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JOHN H. CADY, 68 YEARS, SOLDIER OF FORTUNE, ON THE 
SONOITA, DECEMBER, 1914 



ARIZONA'S YESTERDAY 



THE NARRATIVE OF 

JOHN H. CADY 

PIONEER 



4»4» 



Rewritten and Revised by 

Basil Dillon Woon 
1915 



.C>3 



Copyright, 1916, 
By John H. Cady. 



4' 

APR -7 1916 



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TO 
THE PIONEERS WHO ARE LIVING 

r 

AND TO 

THE MEMORIES OF 
THOSE WHO ARE DEAD 

this book, 

in affectionate tribute to the gallant courage, 
rugged independence and wonderful endurance 
of those adventurous souls who formed the 
vanguard of civilization in the early history of 
the Territory of Arizona and the remainder of 
the Great West, 

is dedicated. 



John H. Cady 
Basil D. Woon 

Patagonia, 

Arizona, 
Nineteen- Fifteen. 



PREFACE 

WHEN I first broached the matter of writing 
his autobiography to John H. Cady, two 
things had struck me particularly. One 
was that of all the literature about Arizona there 
was little that attempted to give a straight, chrono- 
logical and intimate description of events that oc- 
curred during the early life of the Territory, and, 
second, that of all the men I knew, Cady was best 
fitted, by reason of his extraordinary experiences, 
remarkable memory for names and dates, and senior- 
ity in pioneership, to supply the work that I felt 
lacking. 

Some years ago, when I first came West, I hap- 
pened to be sitting on the observation platform of 
a train bound for the orange groves of Southern 
California. A lady with whom I had held some 
slight conversation on the journey turned to me 
after we had left Tucson and had started on the 
long and somewhat dreary journey across the desert 
that stretches from the ''Old Puebla" to ''San Ber- 
doo," and said : 

"Do you know, I actually used to believe all those 
stories about the 'wildness of the West.' I see how 
badly I was mistaken." 

She had taken a half-hour stroll about Tucson 
while the train changed crews and had been im- 
pressed by the — to the casual observer — sleepiness 



6 Arizona's Yesterday 

of the ancient town. She told me that never again 
would she look on a "wild West" moving picture 
without wanting to laugh. She would not believe 
that there had ever been a ''wild West" — at least, 
not in Arizona. And yet it is history that the old 
Territory of Arizona in days g'one by was the 
''wildest and woolliest" of all the West, as any old 
settler will testify. 

There is no doubt that to the tourist the West is 
now a source of constant disappointment. The 
"movies" and certain literature have educated the 
Easterner to the belief that even now Indians go on 
the war-path occasionally, that even now cow-boys 
sometimes find an outlet for their exuberant spirits 
in the hair-raising sport of "shooting up the town," 
and that even now battles between the law-abiding 
cattlemen and the "rustlers" are more or less fre- 
quent. When these people come west in their com- 
fortable Pullmans and discover nothing more inter- 
esting in the shape of Indians than a few old squaws 
selling trinkets and blankets on station platforms, as 
at Yuma; when they visit one of the famous old 
towns where in days gone by white men were wont 
to sleep with one eye and an ear open for marauding 
Indians, and find electric cars, modern office build- 
ings, paved streets crowded with luxurious motors, 
and the inhabitants nonchalantly pursuing the even 
tenor of their ways garbed in habiliments strongly 
suggestive of Forty-fourth street and Broadway; 
when they come West and note these signs of an 



Preface 7 

advancing- and all-conquering civilization, I say, 
they invariably are disappointed. One lady I met 
even thought ''how delightful" it would be ''if the 
Apaches would only hold up the train!" It failed 
altogether to occur to her that, in the days when 
wagon-trains were held up by Apaches, few of those 
in them escaped to tell the gruesome tale. And yet 
this estimable lady, fresh from the drawing-rooms 
of Upper-Radcliffe-on-the-Hudson and the ballroom 
of Rector's, thought how ''delightful" this would 
be! Ah, fortunate indeed is it that the pluck and 
persistence of the pioneers carved a way of peace 
for the pilgrims of today ! 

Considering the foregoing, such a book as this, 
presenting as it does in readable form the Arizona 
West as it really zms, is, in my opinion, most oppor- 
tune and fills a real need. The people have had 
fiction stories from the capable pens of Stewart Ed- 
ward White and his companions in the realm of 
w^estern literature, and have doubtless enjoyed their 
refreshing atmosphere and daring, originality, but, 
despite this, fiction localized in the West and founded 
however-much on fact, does riot supply all the needs 
of the Eastern reader, who demands the truth about 
those old days, presented in a compact and intimate 
form. I cannot too greatly emphasize that word 
''intimate," for it signifies to me the quality that has 
been most lacking in authoritative works on the 
Western country. 

Wlien I first met Captain Cady I found him the 



8 Arizona's Yesterday 

very personification of what he ought not to have 
been, considering the fact that he is one of the oldest 
pioneers in Arizona. Instead of peacefully awaiting 
the close of a long and active career in some old 
soldiers' home, I found him energetically superin- 
tending the hotel he owns at Patagonia, Santa Cruz 
county — and with a badly burned hand, at that. 
There he was, with a characteristic chef's top-dress 
on him (Cady is well known as a first-class cook), 
standing behind the wood-fire range himself, per- 
mitting no one else to do the cooking, allowing no 
one else to shoulder the responsibilities that he, as a 
man decidedly in the autumn of life, should by all 
the rules of the ''game" have long since relinquished. 
Where this grizzled old Indian fighter, near his 
three-score-and-ten, should have been white-haired, 
he was but gray ; where he should have been inflicted 
with the kindred illnesses of advancing old age he 
simply owned up, and sheepishly at that, to a burned 
hand. Where he should have been willing to lay 
down his share of civic responsibility and let the 
"young fellows" have a go at the game, he w'as as 
ever on the firing-line, his name in the local paper a 
half-dozen times each week. Oh, no, it is wrong to 
say that John H. Cady zms a fighter — wrong in the 
spirit of it, for, you see, he is very much of a fighter, 
now. He has lost not one whit of that aggressive- 
ness and sterling courage that he always has owned, 
the only difference being that, instead of fighting 
Indians and bad men, he is now fighting the forces 



Preface 9 

of evil within his own tow^n and contesting, as well, 
the grim advances made by the relentless Reaper. 

In travels that have taken me over a good slice 
of Mother Earth, and that have brought me into 
contact with all sorts and conditions of men, I have 
never met one whose friendship I would rather have 
than that of John H. Cady. If I were asked to sum 
him up I would say that he is a true man — a true 
father, a true and courageous fighter, and a true 
American. He is a man anybody would far sooner 
have with him than against him in a controversy. 
If so far as world-standards go he has not achieved 
fame — I had rather call it ''notoriety" — it is because 
of the fact that the present-day standards do not fit 
the men whom they ignore. With those other men 
who were the wet-nurses of the West in its infantile 
civilization, this hardy pioneer should be honored 
by the present generation and his name handed 
down to posterity as that of one who fought the 
good fight of progress, and fought well, with 
weapons which if perhaps crude and clumsy — as the 
age was crude and clumsy judged by Twentieth 
Century standards — were at least most remarkably 
efTective. 

The subject of this autobiography has traveled 
to many out of the way places and accomplished 
many remarkable things, but the most astonishing 
thing about him is the casual and unaffected way in 
which he, in retrospect, views his extraordinarily 
active life. He talks to me as unconcernedly of 



10 Arizona's Yesterday 

tramping hundreds of miles across a barren desert 
peopled with hostile Indians as though it were 
merely a street-car trip up the thoroughfares of one 
of Arizona's progressive cities. He talks of des- 
perate rides through a wild and dangerous country, 
of little scraps, as he terms them, with bands of mur- 
derous Apaches, of meteoric rises from hired hand 
to ranch foreman, of adventurous expeditions into 
the realm of trade when everything was a risk in a 
land of uncertainty, of journeys through a foreign 
and wild country ''dead broke" — of these and many 
similar things, as though they were commonplace 
incidents scarcely worthy of mention. 

Yet the story of Cady's life is, I venture to state, 
one of the most gripping and interesting ever told, 
both from an historical and from a human point of 
view. It illustrates vividly the varied fortunes en- 
countered by an adventurous pioneer of the old days 
in Arizona and contains, besides, historical facts not 
before recorded that cannot help making the work 
of unfailing interest to all who know, or wish to 
know, the State. 

For you, then, reader, who love or wish to know 
the State of Arizona, with its painted deserts, its 
glorious skies, its wonderful mountains, its magical 
horizons, its illimitable distances, its romantic past 
and its magnificent possibilities, this little book has 
been written. 

Basil Dillon Woon. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

The Boy Soldier 13 

Following the Argonauts 17 

Rough and Tumble on Land and Sea 37 

Through Mexico and Back to Arizona. ... 50 

Stage Driver's Luck 61 

A Frontier Business Man 71 

Ventures and Adventures 80 

Indian Warfare 92 

Deputy Sheriff, Cattleman and Farmer. . . 102 
In Age the Cricket Chirps and Brings — . .115 

illustrations 

" John H. Cady Frontispiece 

• Old Barracks in Tucson 20 

' Ruins of Fort Buchanan 28 

Cady's House on the Sonoita 44 

Ruins of Fort Crittenden 60 

' The Old Ward Homestead 76 

- Sheep Camp on the Sonoita 92 

V Cady and his Family 108 



ARIZONA'S YESTERDAY 



THE BOY SOLDIER 

''For the right that needs assistance, 
For the zvrong that needs resistance, 
For the future in the distance. 
And the good that they could do." 

FOURTEEN years before that broad, bloody 
line began to be drawn between the North 
and the South of the ''United States of 
America," before there came the terrific clash of 
steel and muscle in front of which the entire world 
retreated to a distance, horrified, amazed, fascinated 
and confounded; before there came the dreadful day 
when families were estranged and birthrights sur- 
rendered, loves sacrificed and the blight of the bullet 
placed on hundreds of thousands of sturdy hearts — 
fourteen years before this, on the banks of the 
mighty Ohio at Cincinnati, I was born, on Septem- 
ber 15, 1846. My parents were John N. Cady, of 
Cincinnati, and Maria Clingman Cad^v, who was of 
German descent, and of whom I remember little 
owing to the fact that she died when I reached my 
third birthday. 

Ah, Cincinnati! To me you shall always be my 
City of EXestiny, for it was within your boundaries 



14 Arizona's Yesterday 

that I, boy and man, met my several fates. One sent 
me through the turmoil and suffering of the Civil 
War; another sent me westward mounted on the 
wings of youthful hope and ambition. For that 
alone I am ever in the debt of Ohio's fairest city, 
which I hope to see again some day before there 
sounds for me the Taps. . . . But I do not 
know. The tide of life is more than past its ebb for 
me and I should be thinking more of a quiet rest on 
the hillside, my face turned to the turquoise blue of 
Arizona's matchless infinity, than to the treading 
again of noisy city streets in the country of my 
birth. 

But this is to be a story of Arizona, and I must 
hasten through the events that occurred prior to my 
leaving for the West. When I had reached three 
years of age my father married again — a milliner — 
and moved to Philadelphia. My grandmother, who 
had raised me practically from birth, removed with 
me to Maysville in Kentucky, where I was sent to 
school. Some of my pleasantest memories now are 
of that period in the old-fashioned Kentucky river 
town. 

Just after my ninth birthday my father came back 
to Maysville, claimed me, took me to Philadelphia 
with him and afterwards turned me over to one Wil- 
liam Turner, his wife's brother, who was the owner 
of a farm on the eastern shore of Maryland. I 
stayed at the Turner farm until the outbreak of the 
Civil War in the fall of '61, when mv father, who 



The Boy Soldier 15 

was then working for Devlin & Son, clothiers, with 
headquarters at Broadway and Warren streets, New 
York City, enlisted in Duryea's Zouaves as orderly 
sergeant in Company K. The Zouaves wintered at 
Federal Hill, Baltimore, and I joined my father and 
the regiment there. In the spring w'e moved to 
Washington, joining there the great Army of the 
Potomac, with which we stayed during that army's 
succession of magnificent battles, until after the 
Fredericksburg fight in '63. 

In Washington we were quartered at Arlington 
Heights and I remember that I used to make pocket 
money by buying papers at the Washington railway 
depot and selling them on the Heights. The papers 
were, of course, full of nothing but war news, some 
of them owing their initial publication to the war, 
so great was the public's natural desire for news of 
the titanic struggle that w^as engulfing the continent. 
Then, as now, there were many conflicting state- 
ments as to the movements of troops, and so forth, 
but the war correspondents had full rein to write as 
they pleased, and the efforts of some of them stand 
out in my memory today as marvels of word-paint- 
ing and penned rhetoric. 

When Grant took command of the Army of the 
Potomac I left the army, three or four days before 
reinforcements for General Sherman, who was then 
making preparations for his famous ''march to the 
sea," left for Kentucky. At Aguire Creek, near 
Washington, I purchased a cargo of apples for 



16 Arizona's Yesterday 

$900 — m}^ first of two exceedingly profitable ven- 
tures in the apple-selling industry — and, after sell- 
ing them at a handsome profit, followed Sherman's 
reinforcements as far as Cincinnati. I did not at 
this time stay long in the city of my birth, going in 
a few days to Camp Nelson, Ky., where I obtained 
work driving artillery horses to Atlanta and bring- 
ing back to Chattanooga condemned army stock. 
Even at that time — 1864 — the proud old city of At- 
lanta felt the shadow of its impending doom, but 
few believed Sherman would go to the lengths he 
did. 

After the close of the war in 1865 I enlisted in 
Cincinnati, on October 12, in the California Rocky 
Mountain service. Before this, however, I had 
shipped in the Ram Vindicator of the Mississippi 
Squadron and after being transferred to the gun- 
boat Syren had helped move the navy yard from 
Mound City, 111., to Jefferson Barracks, St. Louis, 
Mo., where it still is. 

I was drafted in the First United States Cavalry 
and sent to Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania, from 
which place I traveled to New Orleans, where I 
joined my reg'iment. I was allotted to Company C 
and remember my officers to have been Captain 
Dean, First Lieutenant Vail and Second Lieutenant 
Winters. Soon after my arrival in New Orleans we 
commenced our journey to California, then the 
golden country of every man's dreams and the 
Mecca of every man's ambition. 



FOLLOWING THE ARGONAUTS 

So it's Westward Ho! for the land of zvorth, 

Where the "is," not ''zvas'' is vital; 

Where brawn for praise must win the earth, 

Nor risk its new-born title. 

Where to damn a man is to say he ran. 

And heedless seeds are sown, 

Where the thrill of strife is the spice of life, 

And the creed is ''guard your own !" 

— WOON. 

WHEN the fast mail steamer which had car- 
ried us from the Isthmus of Panama (we 
had journeyed to the Isthmus from New 
Orleans in the little transport McClellan), steamed 
through the Golden Gate and anchored off the Pre- 
sidio I looked with great eagerness and curiosity on 
the wonderful city known in those days as "the 
toughest hole on earth," of which I had read and 
heard so much and which I had so longed to see. I 
saw a city rising on terraces from the smooth 
waters of a glorious bay whose wavelets were tem- 
pered by a sunshine that was as brilliant as it was 
ineffective against the keen sea-breeze of winter. 
The fog that had obscured our sight outside the 
Golden Gate was now gone — vanished like the mist- 
wraiths of the long-ago philosophers, and the glo- 
rious city of San Francisco was revealed to view. 



18 Arizona's Yesterday 

I say "glorious," but the term must be understood 
to apply only to the city's surroundings, which were 
in truth magnificent. She looked like some imperial 
goddess, her forehead encircled by the faint band of 
mist that still lingered caressingly to the mountain 
tops, her countenance glistening with the dew on 
the green hill-slopes, her garments quaintly fash- 
ioned for her by the civilization that had brought 
her into being, her slippers the lustrous waters of 
the Bay itself. Later I came to know that she, too, 
was a goddess of moods, and dangerous moods; 
a coquette to some, a love to others, and to many a 
heartless vampire that sucked from them their hard- 
wrung dust, scattered their gold to the four winds 
of avarice that ever circled enticingly about the vor- 
tex of shallow joys that the City harbored, and, 
after intoxicating them with her beauty and her 
wine, flung them aside to make ready for the next 
comer. Too well had San Francisco merited the 
title I give it in the opening lines of this chapter. 
Some say that the earthquake and the fire came like 
vitriol cast on the features of a beautiful woman for 
the prostitution of her charms; but I, who lost little 
to her lures, am not one to judge. 

My memories of San Francisco are at any rate 
a trifle hazy now, for it is many, many years since I 
last saw the sun set over the Marin hills. An era 
has passed since the glamour of the Coast of High 
Barbaree claimed my youthful attention. But I 
remember a city as evil within as it was lovely with- 



Following the Argonauts 19 

out, a city where were gathered the very dregs of 
humanity from the four corners of the earth. What 
Port Said is now, San Francisco was then, only 
worse. For every crime that is committed in the 
dark alleys of the Suez port or the equally murky 
callejons of the pestholes of Mexico, four were com- 
mitted in the beautiful Californian town when I first 
went there. Women as well as men carried "hard- 
ware" strapped outside, and scarcely one who had 
not at some time found this precaution useful. The 
city abounded with footpads and ruffians of every 
nationality and description, whose prices for cutting 
a throat or "rolling a stiff" depended on the cupidity 
of the moment or on the quantity of liquor their 
capacious stomachs held. Scores of killings occurred 
and excited little comment. 

Thousands of men were daily passing in and out 
of the city, drawn by the lure of the Sierra gold- 
fields; some of these came back with the joy of 
dreams come true and full pokes hung around their 
necks, some came with the misery of utter failure in 
their hearts, and some — alas, they were many, re- 
turned not at all. 

The Barbary Coast was fast gaining for itself an 
unenviable reputation throughout the world. Every 
time one walked on Pacific street with any money in 
pocket he took his life in his hand. ''Guard Your 
Own!'' was the accepted creed of the time and woe 
to him who could not do so. Gold was thrown 
about like water. The dancing girls made fabulous 



20 Arizona's Yesterday 

sums as commissions on drinks their consorts could 
be persuaded to buy. Hundreds of thousands of dol- 
lars were spent nightly in the great temples devoted 
to gambling, and there men risked on the luck of a 
moment or the turn of a painted wheel fortunes 
wrung from the soil by months and sometimes years 
of terrific work in the diggings. The most famous 
gamblers of the West at that time made their head- 
quarters in San Francisco, and they came from all 
countries. England contributed not a few of these 
gentlemen traders in the caprices of fortune, France 
her quota, Germany very few and China many; but 
these last possessed the dives, the lowest kind of 
gambling places, where men went only when they 
were desperate and did not care. 

We were not at this time, however, to be given an 
opportunity to see as much of San Francisco as most 
of us would have liked. After a short stay at the 
Presidio we were sent to Wilmington, then a small 
port in the southern part of the State but now incor- 
porated^ in the great city of Los Angeles. Here we 
drew our horses for the long trek across the desert 
to our future home in the Territory of Arizona. 
There was no railroad at that time in California, the 
line not even having been surveyed as far as San 
Jose, which was already a city but, instead of being, 
as now, the market-place for a dozen fertile and 
beautiful valleys, she was then merely an outfitting 
point for parties of travelers, prospectors, cattlemen 



Following the Argonauts 21 

and the like, and was also a station and terminus for 
various stage lines. 

Through San Jose, too, came those of the gold- 
seekers, bound for the high Sierras on the border 
of the desert, who had not taken the Sacramento 
River route and had decided to brave instead the 
dangers of the trail through the fertile San Joaquin, 
up to the Feather River and thus into the diggings 
about Virginia City. Gold had been found by that 
time in Nevada and hundreds of intrepid men were 
facing the awful Mojave and Nevada deserts, 
blazing hot in day-time and icy cold at night, to 
seek the new Eldorados. Since this is a book about 
pioneers, and since I am one of them, it is fitting to 
stay awhile and consider what civilization owes to 
these daring souls who formed the vanguard of her 
army. Cecil Rhodes opened an Empire by mobilizing 
a black race; Jim Hill opened another when he struck 
westward with steel rails. But the pioneers of the 
early gold rushes created an empire of immense 
riches with no other aid than their own gnarled 
hands and sturdy hearts. They opened up a country 
as vast as it w)as rich, and wrested from the very 
bosom of Mother Earth treasures that had been in 
her jealous keeping for ages before the era of Man. 
They braved sudden death, death from thirst and 
starvation, death from prowling savages, death 
from the wild creatures, — all that the works of man 
might flourish where they had not feared to tread. 



22 Arizona's Yesterday 

It is the irony of fate that these old pioneers, 
many of whom hated civiHzation and were fleeing 
from her guiles, should have been the advance- 
guard of the very Power they sought to avoid. 

The vast empire of Western America is strewn 
with the bones of these men. Some of them lie in 
kindly resting places, the grass over their graves 
kept green by loving friends; some lie uncared for 
in potters' fields or in the cemeteries of homes for 
the aged, and some — a vast horde — still lie bleached 
and grim, the hot sand drifted over them by the 
desert winds. 

But, wherever they lie, all honor to the pioneer! 
There should be a day set apart on which every 
American should revere the memory of those men 
of long ago who hewed the way for the soft paths 
that fall to the generation of today. 

What San Bernardino is now to the west-bound 
traveler, Wilmington was then — the end of the des- 
ert. From Wilmington eastward stretched one tre- 
mendous ocean of sand, interspersed here and there 
by majestic mountains in the fastnesses of which 
little fertile valleys with clear mountain streams 
were to be discovered later by the pioneer home- 
steaders. Where now are miles upon miles of yel- 
low-fruited orange and lemon groves, betraying the 
care and knowledge of a later generation of scien- 
tific farmers, were then only dreary, barren wastes, 
with only the mountains and clumps of sagebrush, 



Following the Argonauts 23 

soapwieed, cacti, creosote bushes and mesquite to 
break the everlasting monotony of the prospect. 

Farming- then, indeed, was almost as little thought 
of as irrigation, for men's minds were fixed on the 
star of whitest brilliancy^ — Gold. Men even made 
fortunes in the diggings and returned East and 
bought farms, never realizing that what might be 
pushed above the soil of California was destined to 
prove of far greater consequence than anything men 
would ever find hidden beneath. 

The march to Arizona was both difficult and dan- 
gerous, and was to be attempted safely only by large 
parties. Water was scarce and wells few and far 
between, and there were several stretches as, for 
instance, that between what are now known as the 
Imperial Mountains and Yuma, of more than sixty 
miles with no water at all. The well at Dos Palmas 
was not dug until a later date. Across these 
stretches the traveler had to depend on what water 
he could manage to pack in a canteen strung around 
his waist or on his horse or mule. On the march 
were often to be seen, as they are still, those won- 
derful desert mirages of which so much has been 
written by explorers and scientists. Sometimes 
these took the form of lakes, fringed with palms, 
which tantalized and ever kept mockingly at a dis- 
tance. Many the desert traveler who has been 
cruelly deceived by these mirages! 

Yuma, of which I have just spoken, is famed for 
many reasons. For one thing, the story that United 



24 Arizona's Yesterday 

States army officers "raised the temperature of the 
place thirty degrees" to be reHeved from duty there, 
has been laughed at wherever Americans have been 
wont to congregate. And that old story told by 
Sherman, of the soldier who died at Yuma after 
living a particularly vicious existence here below, 
and who soon afterwards telegraphed from Hades 
for his blankets, has also done much to heighten the 
reputation of the little city, which sometimes still 
has applied to it the distinction of being the hottest 
place in the United States. This, however, is 
scarcely correct, as many places in the Southwest — 
Needles in California, and the Imperial Valley are 
examples — have often demonstrated higher temper- 
atures than have ever been known at Yuma. A sum- 
mer at the little Colorado River town is quite hot 
enough, however, to please the most tropical sav- 
age. It may be remarked here, in justice to the rest 
of the State, that the temperature of Yuma is not 
typical of Arizona as a whole. In the region I now 
live in — the Sonoita Valley in the southeastern part 
of the State, and in portions around Prescott, the 
summer temperatures are markedly cool and tem- 
perate. 

Yuma, how'ever, is not famed for its temperature 
alone; in fact, that feature of its claim to notice is 
least to be considered. The real noteworthy fact 
about Yuma from a historical point of view is that, 
as Arizona City, it was one of the earliest-settled 
points in the Territory and was at first easily the 



Following the Argonauts 25 

most important. The route of the major portion of 
the Forty-Niners took them across the Colorado 
River where Fort Yuma was situated on the Cah- 
fornia side; and the trend of exploration, business 
and commerce a few years later flowed westward to 
Yuma over the picturesque plains of the Gadsden 
Purchase. The famous California Column ferried 
itself across the Colorado at Yuma, and later on the 
Overland Mail came through the settlement. It is 
now a division point on the Southern Pacific Rail- 
way, just across the line from California, and has a 
population of three or four thousand. 

At the time I first saw the place there was only 
Fort Yuma, on the California side of the river, and 
a small settlement on the Arizona side called Ari- 
zona City. It had formerly been called Colorado 
City, but the name was changed when the town was 
permanently settled. There were two ferries in op- 
eration at Yuma when our company arrived there, 
one of them run by the peaceable Yuma Indians and 
the other by a company headed by Don Diego Jaeger 
and Hartshorne. Fort Yuma had been established 
in 1851 by Major Heintzelman, U.S.A., but owing 
to scurvy (see De Long's history of Arizona) and 
the great difficulty in getting supplies, the Colorado 
River being then uncharted for traflic, it was ahan- 
doned and not permanently re-established until a 
year later, when Major Heintzelman returned from 
San Diego. The townsite of Colorado City was 
laid out in 1854, but floods wiped out the town witli 



26 Arizona's Yesterday 

the result that a permanent settlement, called Ari- 
zona City, was not established until about 1862, 
four years before I reached there. 

The first steamboat to reach Yuma with supplies 
was the Uncle Sam, which arrived in 1852. Of all 
this I can tell, of course, only by hearsay, but there 
is no doubt that the successful voyage of the Uncle 
Sam to Y^ma established the importance of that 
place and gave it pre-eminence over any other ship- 
ping point into the territories for a long time. 

Until the coming of the railroad, supplies for Ari- 
zona were shipped from San Francisco to the mouth 
of the Colorado and ferried from there up the river 
to Yuma, being there transferred to long wagon 
trains which traveled across the plains to Tucson, 
which was then the distributing point for the whole 
Territory. 

Tucson was, of course, the chief city. I say ''city" 
only in courtesy, for it was such in importance only, 
its size being smaller than an ordinary eastern vil- 
lage. Prescott, which was the first Territorial 
Capital; Tubac, considered by many the oldest set- 
tled town in Arizona, near which the famous mines 
worked by Sylvester Mowry were located; Ehren- 
berg, an important stage point ; Sacaton, in the Pima 
and Maricopa Indian country, and other small set- 
tlements such as Apache Pass, which was a fort, 
were already in existence. The Gadsden Purchase 
having been of very recent date, most of the popu- 
lation was Indian, after which came the Mexicans 



Following the Argonauts 27 

and Spaniards and then the Americans, who arro- 
gantly termed themselves the Whites, although the 
Spaniards possessed fully as white a complexion as 
the average pioneer from the eastern states. Until 
recently the Indian dominated the white man in Ari- 
zona in point of numbers, but fortunately only one 
Indian race — the Apache — showed unrelenting hos- 
tility to the white man and his works. Had all the 
Arizona Indians been as hostile as were the Apaches, 
the probabilities are that the settlement of Arizona 
by the whites would have been of far more recent 
date, for in instance after instance the Americans 
in Arizona were obliged to rely on the help of the 
peaceful Indians to combat the rapacious Apaches. 
Yuma is the place where the infamous ''Doc" 
Glanton and his gang operated. This was long be- 
fore my time, and as the province of this book is 
merely to tell the story of life in the Territory as I 
saw it, it has no place within these pages. It may, 
however, be mentioned that Glanton was the leader 
of a notorious gang of freebooters who established 
a ferry across the Colorado at Yuma and used it as 
a hold-up scheme to trap unwary emigrants. The 
Yuma Indians also operated a ferry, for which they 
had hired as pilot a white man, whom some asserted 
to have been a deserter from the United States 
army. One day Glanton and his gang, angered at 
the successful rivalry of the Indians, fell on them 
and slew the pilot. The Glanton gang was subse- 
quently wiped out by the Indians in retaliation. 



28 Arizona's Yesterday 

When the Gila City gold rush set in Yuma was 
the point to which the adventurers came to reach 
the new city. I have heard that as many as three 
thousand gold seekers congregated at this find, but 
nothing is now to be seen of the former town but 
a few old deserted shacks and some Indian wickiups. 
Gold is still occasionally found in small quantities 
along the Gila River near this point, but the immense 
placer deposits have long since disappeared, although 
experts have been quoted as saying that the com- 
pany brave enough to explore the fastnesses of the 
mountains back of the Gila at this point will prob- 
ably be rewarded by finding rich gold mines. 

I will not dwell on the hardships of that desert 
march from Yuma to Tucson, for which the rigors 
of the Civil War had fortunately prepared most of 
us, further than to say that it was many long, weary 
days before w^e finally came in sight of the "Old 
Pueblo." In Tucson I became, soon after our ar- 
rival, twenty years old. I was a fairly hardy young- 
ster, too. We camped in Tucson on a piece of 
ground in the center of the town and soon after our 
arrival were set to work making a clean, orderly 
camp-park out of the wilderness of creosote bushes 
and mesquite. I remember that for some offence 
against the powers of the day I was then ''serving 
time" for a short while and, among other things, I 
cut shrub on the site of Tucson's Military Plaza, 
with an inelegant piece of iron chain dangling un- 
comfortably from my left leg. Oh, I wasn't a saint 



Following the Argonauts 29 

in those days any more than I am a particularly 
bright candidate for wings and a harp now ! I gave 
my superior officers fully as much trouble as the 
rest of 'em ! 

Tucson's Military Plaza, it may be mentioned 
here, was, as stated, cleared by Company C, First 
United States Cavalry, and that body of troops w&.s 
the only lot of soldiery that ever camped on that 
spot, which is now historic. In after years it was 
known as Camp Lowell, and that name is still ap- 
plied to a fort some seven miles east of Tucson. 

Captain Dean had not come with us to Arizona, 
having been taken ill in California and invalided 
home. Lieutenant Vail, or, as he was entitled to be 
called, Brevet-Major Vail, commanded Company C 
in his absence, and he had under him as fearless a 
set of men as could have been found anywhere in 
the country in those days. Vail himself was the 
highest type of officer — stern and unbending where 
discipline was concerned, and eminently courageous. 
Second Lieutenant Winters was a man of the same 
stamp, and both men became well known in the Ter- 
ritory within a few months after their arrival be- 
cause of their numerous and successful forays 
against marauding Indians. Vail is alive yet, or 
was a short time ago. 

After some weeks in Tucson, which was then a 
typical w^estern town peopled by miners, assayers, 
surveyors, tradespeople, a stray banker or two and, 
last but not least by any means, gamblers, we were 



30 Arizona's Yesterday 

moved to old Camp Grant, which was situated sev- 
eral hundred yards downstream from the point 
where the Aravaipa Creek runs into^ the San Pedro. 
Among others whom I remember as living in 
Tucson or near neighborhood in 1866 were: 
Henry Glassman, Green Rusk, 

Tom Yerkes, Frank Hodge, 

Lord & Williams, Alex. Levin, 

Pete Kitchen, Bob Crandall, 

— Tongue, — Wheat, 

The Kelsey boys, Smith Turner, 

Sandy McClatchy, "Old" Pike. 

Glassman lived most of the time at Tubac. 
Yerkes owned the Settlers Store in Tubac. Lord 
and Williams owned the chief store in Tucson and 
were agents for the United States Mail. Pete 
Kitchen was at Potrero Ranch; but Pete, who was 
more feared by the Indians than any white man in 
the Territory, deserves a whole chapter to himself. 
Tongue was a storekeeper. Green Rusk owned a 
popular dance house. Hodge and Levin had a 
saloon. Wheat owned a saloon and afterwards a 
ranch near Florence. The remainder were mostly 
gamblers, good fellows, every one of them. ''Old 
Pike" especially was a character whose memory is 
now fondly cherished by every pioneer who knew 
him. He could win or lose with the same perpetual 
joviality, but he generally won. The principal 
gambling game in those days was Mexican monte, 
played with forty cards. Poker was also played a 



Following the Argonauts 31 

great deal. Keno, faro and roulette were not intro- 
duced until later, and the same may be said of 
pangingi, the Scandinavian game. 

There were several tribes of Apaches wintering 
at Camp Grant the winter we went there, if I remem- 
ber correctly, among them being the Tontos and 
Aravaipas. All of them, however, were under the 
authority of one chief — Old Eskiminzin, one of the 
"'jnost blood-thirsty and vindictive of all the old 
Apache leaders. The Government fed these Apaches 
well during the winter in return for pledges they 
made to keep the peace. This was due to the altru- . 
ism of some mistaken gentlemen in the councils of 
authority in the East, who knew nothing of condi- 
tions in the Territory and who wrongly believed 
that the word of an Apache Indian would hold good. 
We, who knew the Indian, understood differently, 
but we were obliged to obey orders, even though 
these were responsible in part for the many Indian 
tragedies that followed. 

The Apache was a curious character. By nature 
a nomad, by temperament a fighter, and from birth 
a hater of the white man, he saw nothing good in 
the ways of civilization except that which fed him, 
and he took that only as a means to an end. Often 
an Indian chief would solemnly swear to keep the 
peace with his 'Svhite brethren" for a period of 
months, and the next day go forth on a marauding 
expedition and kill as many of his beloved "breth- 
ren" as he could lay his hands on. Every dead 



32 Arizona's Yesterday 

white man was a feather in some Apache's head- 
dress, for so they regarded it. 

One day Chief Eskiminzin appeared with a pro- 
test from the tribes against the quahty of the rations 
they were receiving. It was early spring and the 
protest, as we well knew, was merely his way of 
saying that the Indians were no longer dependent on 
what the government offered but could now hunt 
their own meat. Our commanding officer endeav- 
ored to placate the old chief, who went back for a 
conference with his men. Then he re-appeared, 
threw down his rations, the others doing the same, 
and in a few minutes the entire encampment of 
Apaches was in the saddle. 

Some little time after they had gone Lieutenant 
Vail, suspecting trouble, sent a man dow'n the trail 
to investigate. A few miles away was a ranch 
owned by a man named Israels. The scout found 
the ranch devastated, with Israels, his wife and fam- 
ily brutally slain and all the stock driven off. He 
reported to Vail, who headed an expedition of retal- 
iation — the first I ever set forth on. We trailed the 
Indians several days, finally coming up with them 
and in a pitched battle killing many of them. 

This was just a sample of the many similar inci- 
dents that occurred from time to time throughout 
the Territory. Invariably the Military attempted to 
find the raiders, and sometimes they were successful. 
But it seemed impossible to teach the Apaches their 
lesson, and even now there are sometimes simmer- 



Following the Argonauts 33 

ings of discontent among the surviving Apaches on 
their reservation. They find it difficult to beheve 
that their day and the day of the remainder of the 
savage Indian race is gone forever. 

It was during this stay at Fort Grant that Com- 
pany C was ordered to escort the first Southern Pa- 
cific survey from Apache Pass, which was a govern- 
ment fort, to Sacaton, in the Pima Indian country. 
The route abounded with hostile Apaches and was 
considered extremely dangerous. I have mentioned 
this as the ''first Southern Pacific survey," but this 
does not mean that there were not before that other 
surveys of a similar character, looking to the estab- 
lishment of a transcontinental railroad route through 
the Territory. As early as 1851 a survey was made 
across Northern Arizona by Captain L. Sitgreaves, 
approximating nearly the present route of the Santa 
Fe Railway. A year or two later Lieutenant A. W. 
Whipple made a survey along the line of the 35th 
degree parallel. Still later Lieutenant J. G. Parke 
surveyed a line nearly on that of the Southern Pa- 
cific survey. At that time, just before the Gadsden 
treaty, the territory surveyed was in the republic of 
Mexico. These surveys were all made by order of 
the then Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, who 
aroused a storm of protest in the East against his 
''misguided attention to the desolate West." But 
few statesmen and fewer of the outside public in 
that day possessed the prophetic vision to perceive 
the future greatness of what were termed the "arid 



34 Arizona's Yesterday 

wastes" of Arizona and California. This was shown 
by the perfect hail of protest that swept to the White 
House when the terms of the Gadsden Treaty, 
drawn up by a man who as minister to a great minor 
republic had had ample opportunities to study at his 
leisure the nature of the country and the people with 
whom he dealt, became known. 

This Southern Pacific survey party was under the 
superintendence of Chief Engineer lego — I believe 
that is the way he spelled his name- — ^who was recog- 
nized as one of the foremost men in his line in the 
country. The size of our party, which included 
thirty surveyors and surveyors' helpers in addition to 
the soldier escort, served to deter the Indians, and we 
had no trouble that I remember. It is perhaps worthy 
of note that the railroad, as it was afterwards 
built — it reached Tucson in 1880 — did not exactly 
follow the line of this survey, not touching at Saca- 
ton. It passed a few miles south of that point, near 
the famous Casa Grande, where now is a consider- 
able town. 

Railroad and all other surveying then was an ex- 
ceedingly hazardous job, especially in Arizona, 
where so many Indian massacres had already oc- 
curred and were still to occur. In fact, any kind of 
a venture that involved traveling, even for a short 
distance, whether it was a small prospecting or emi- 
grant's outfit or whether it was a long "train on 
hoofs," laden with goods of the utmost value, had to 
be escorted by a squad of soldiers, and often by an 



Following the Argonauts 35 

entire company. Even thus protected, frequent and 
daring raids were made by the cruel and fearless 
savages, whose only dread seemed to be starvation 
and the on-coming of the white man, and who would 
go to any lengths to get food. 

Looking back in the light of present day reason- 
ing, I am bound to say that it would be wrong to 
blame the Apaches for something their savage and 
untutored natures could not help. Before the ''pale- 
face" came to the Territory the Indian was lord of 
all he surveyed, from the peaks of the mountains 
down to the distant line of the silvery horizon. He 
was monarch of the desert and could roam over his 
demesne without interference save from hostile 
tribes; and into his very being there was born nat- 
urally a spirit of freedom which the white man with 
all his weapons could never kill. He knew the best 
hunting grounds, he knew where grew excellent 
fodder for his horses, he knew where water ran the 
3-ear around, and in the rainy season he knew where 
the waterholes were to be found. In his wild life 
there was only the religion of living, and the divinity 
of Freedom. 

When the white man came he, too, found the fer- 
tile places, the running water and the hunting 
grounds, and he confiscated them in the name of a 
higher civilization of which the savage knew nothing 
and desired to know less. Could the Indian then be 
blamed for his overwhelming hatred of the white 
man? His was the inferior, the barbaric race, to be 



36 Arizona^s Yesterday 

sure, but could he be blamed for not believing so? 
His was a fight against civilization, true, and it was 
a losing fight as all such are bound to be, but the 
Indian did not know what civilization was except 
that it meant that he was to be robbed of his hunting 
grounds and stripped of his heritage of freedom. 
Therefore he fought tirelessly, savag-ely, demoniac- 
ally, the inroads of the white man into his territory. 
All that he knew, all that he wished to understand, 
was that he had been free and happy before the 
white man had come with his thunder-weapons, his 
fire-water and his mad, mad passion for yellow gold. 
The Indian could not understand or admit that the 
White was the superior, all-conquering race, and, 
not understanding, he became hostile and a battling 
demon. 



So intense was the hatred of the white man among 
the Apaches of the period of which I speak that it was 
their custom to cut off the noses of any one of their women 
caught in illegal intercourse with a white man. This done, 
she was driven from, her tribe, declared an outcast from 
her people, and frequently starved to death. I can re- 
member many instances of this exact kind. 



ROUGH AND TUMBLE ON LAND AND SEA 

"' 'Twas youth, my friend, and joy fulness besides, 
That made me breast the treachery of Neptune's 
fickle tides/' 

WHEN Spring came around in the year 1867 
we were moved to Tubac, where we were 
joined by K Company of my regiment 
and C Company of the Thirty-Second Infantry. 
Tubac, considered by some to be the oldest town in 
Arizona, before the consummation of the Gadsden 
Treaty was a mihtary post at which the repubhc of 
Mexico regularly kept a small garrison. It was sit- 
uated on the Santa Cruz River, which at this point 
generally had considerable w^ater in it. This was 
probably the reason for the establishment of the 
town, for water has always been the controlling fac- 
tor in a settlement's progress in Arizona. The river 
is dry at Tubac now, however, except in unusually 
rainy seasons, irrigation and cattle having robbed 
the stream of its former volume. 

At the time we were quartered there Tubac was 
a place of no small importance, and after Tucson 
and Prescott were discounted it was probably the 
largest settlement in the Territory. Patagonia has 
now taken the position formerly occupied by the old 
adobe town as center of the rich mining zone of 
Southern Arizona, and the glories of Tubac (if they 



38 Arizona's Yesterday 

can be given that name) are, like the glories of 
Tombstone, gone. Unlike those of Tombstone, 
however, they are probably gone forever. Tomb- 
stone may yet rise from the ashes of her splendid 
past to a future as one of the important towns of 
the Southwest, if the stories of untold riches near by 
her are to be believed. 

A little to the east of Tubac and separating that 
town from Patagonia is Mount Wrightson, one of 
the highest mountains in Arizona. Nicknamed "Old 
Baldy" after its famous namesake in California, this 
mammoth pile of rock and copper was in the old 
days a landmark for travelers, visible sometimes for 
days ahead on the wagon trails. It presaged near 
arrival in Tucson, for in a direct line Old Baldy 
is probably not further than forty miles from the 
Old Pueblo. 

We camped at Tubac during the summer and part 
of the winter of 1867 and I remember that while we 
were there I cooked a reception banquet to Colonel 
Richard C. McCormick, who was then and until 
1869 Governor of the Territory of Arizona. I for- 
get his business in Tubac, but it was either an elec- 
tioneering trip or one of inspection after his appoint- 
ment to the office of Governor in 1866. 

In the early part of 1868 we moved to Fort 
Buchanan, wihich before the war had been a military 
post of considerable importance. It received its name 
from the President before Lincoln and was garri- 
soned by Confederates during the Civil War. We 



Rough and Tumble 39 

re-built the fort and re-named it Fort Crittenden, in 
honor of General Thomas L. Crittenden, a son of 
the Hon. John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, who was 
then in command of the military district embracing 
that portion of the Territory south of the Gila River. 
Crittenden was beautifully situated on the Sonoita, 
about ten miles from where I now live and in the 
midst of some of the most marvelously beautiful 
scenery to be found on the American continent. 
Fort Crittenden is no longer occupied and has not 
been for some time; but a short distance toward 
Benson is Fort Huachuaca, where at present a gar- 
rison of the Ninth Cavalry is quartered. 

During part of 1868 I carried mail from where 
Calabasas is now — it was then Fort Mason — to Fort 
Crittenden, a proceeding emphatically not as simple 
as it may sound. My way lay over a mountainous 
part of what is now Santa Cruz county, a district 
which at that time, on account of the excellent fod- 
der and water, abounded with hostile Indians. 

On one occasion that I well remember I had 
reached the waterhole over which is now the first 
railroad bridge north of Patagonia, about a half 
mile from the present town, and had stopped there 
to water my horse. While the animal was drinking 
I struck a match to light my pipe — and instantly I 
ducked. A bullet whistled over my head, near 
enough to give me a strong premonition that a 
couple of inches closer would have meant my end. I 
seized the bridle of my horse, leaped on his back, 



40 Arizona^s Yesterday 

bent low over the saddle and rode for it. I escaped, 
but it is positive in my mind today that if those 
Apaches had been better accustomed to the use of 
the white man's weapons I w^ould not now be alive 
to tell the story. 

I was a great gambler, even in those days. It 
was the fashion, then, to gamble. Everybody except 
the priests and parsons gambled, and there was a 
scarcity of priests and parsons in the sixties. Men 
would gamble their dust, and when that was gone 
they would gamble their worldly possessions, and 
when those had vanished they would gamble their 
clothes, and if they lost their clothes there were 
instances where some men even wient so far as to 
gamble their wives ! And every one of us, each day, 
gambled his life, so you see the whole life in the 
Territory in the early days was one continuous 
gamble. Nobody save gamblers came out there, be- 
cause nobody but gamblers would take the chance. 

As I have stated, I followed the natural trend. I 
had a name, even in those days, of being one of the 
most spirited gamblers in the regiment, and that 
meant the countryside; and I confess it today with- 
out shame, although it is some time now since I 
raised an ante. I remember one occasion when my 
talents for games of chance turned out rather 
peculiarly. We had gone to Calabasas to get a load 
of wheat from a store owned by a man named Rich- 
ardson, who had been a Colonel in the volunteer 
service. Richardson had as manager of the store 



Rough and Tumble 41 

a fellow named Long, who \\^as well known for his 
passion for gambling. After we had given our order 
we sought about for some diversion to make the 
time pass, and Long caught sight of the goatskin 
chaperejos I was wearing. He stared at them en- 
viously for a minute and then proposed to buy them. 

''They're not for sale," said I, ''but if you like 
I'll play you for 'em." 

"Done!" said Long, and put up sixteen dollars 
against the chaps. 

Now, Long was a game sport, but that didn't 
make him lucky. I won his sixteen dollars and then 
he bet me some whiskey against the lot, and again I 
won. By the time I had beat him five or six times, 
had won a good half of the store's contents, and 
was proposing to play him for his share in the store 
itself, he cried quits. We loaded our plunder on the 
wagon. Near Bloxton, or where Bloxton now is, 
four miles west of Patagonia, we managed to upset 
the wagon, and half the whiskey and wheat never 
was retrieved. We had the wherewithal to "fix 
things" with the ofificers, however, and went unre- 
proved, even making a tidy profit selling what stufif 
we had left to the soldiers. 

At that time the company maintained gardens on 
a part of what afterwards was the Sanford Rancho, 
and at one time during 1868 I was gardening there 
with three others. The gardens were on a ranch 
owned by William Morgan, a discharged sergeant 
of our company. Morgan had one Mexican work- 



42 Arizona's Yesterday 

ing for him and there were four of us from the Fort 
stationed there to cuhivate the gardens and keep him 
company — more for the latter reason than the first, 
I beheve. We took turn and turn about of one 
month at the Fort and one month at the gardens, 
which were about fourteen miles from the Fort. 

One of us was Private White, of Company K. 
He was a mighty fine young fellow, and we all liked 
him. Early one morning the five of us were eating 
breakfast in the cabin, an illustration of which is 
given, and White went outside for something. Soon 
afterward we heard several reports, but, figuring 
that White had shot at some animal or other, we 
did not even get up from our meal. Finally came 
another shot, and then another, and Morgan got up 
and peered from the door. He gave a cr}^ 

''Apaches!" he shouted. "They're all around! 
Poor White " 

It was nip-and-tuck then. For hours we kept up 
a steady fire at the Indians, who circled the house 
with blood-curdling whoops. We killed a number 
of them before they finally took themselves off. 
Then we went forth to look for White. We found 
our comrade lying on his back a short distance away, 
his eyes staring unseeingly to the sky. He was dead. 
We carried him to the house and discussed the sit- 
uation. 

''They'll come back," said Morgan, with convic- 
tion. 



Rough and Tumble 43 

"Then it's up to one of us to ride to the Fort," I 
said. 

But Morgan shook his head. 

''There isn't a horse anywhere near," he said. 

We had an old army mule working on the gar- 
dens and I bethought myself of him. 

''There's the mule," I suggested. 

My companions were silent. That mule was the 
slowest creature in Arizona, I firmly believed. It 
was as much as he could do to walk, let alone gallop. 

"Somebody's got to go, or we'll all be killed," I 
said. "Let's draw lots." 

They agreed and we found five straws, one of 
them shorter than the rest. These we drew, and the 
short one fell to me. 

I look back on that desperate ride now with feel- 
ings akin to horror. Surrounded with murderous 
savages. With only a decrepit mule to ride and four- 
teen miles to go, it seemed impossible that I could 
get through safely. My companions said good-bye 
to me as though I were a scafTold victim about to be 
executed. But get through I did — how I do not 
know — and the chillingly weird war-calls of the 
Indians howling at me fromi the hills as I rode re- 
turn to my ears even now with extraordinary vivid- 
ness. 

And, as Morgan had prophesied, the Apaches did 
"come back." It was a month later, and I had been 
transferred back to the Fort, when a nephew of 
Colonel Dunkelberger and William J. Osborn of 



44 Arizona's Yesterday 

Tucson were riding near Morgan's ranch. Apaches 
ambushed them, slew the Colonel's nephew, whose 
name has slipped my memory, and wounded Osborn. 
The latter, who was a person of considerable impor- 
tance in the Territory, escaped to Morgan's ranch. 
An expedition of retaliation was immediately organ- 
ized at the Fort and the soldiers pursued the assas- 
sins into Mexico, finally coming up with them and 
killing a number. I did not accompany the troops 
on this occasion, having been detailed to the Santa 
Rita range to bring in lumber to be used in building 
houses. 

I returned from the Santa Ritas in July and found 
an order had been received at the Fort from the War 
Department that all men whose times had expired 
or were shortly to expire should be congregated in 
Tucson and from there marched to California for 
their discharge. A few weeks later I went to the 
Old Pueblo and, together with several hundred 
others from all parts of the Territory, was mustered 
out and started on the return march to Wilmington 
where we arrived about October 1. On the twelfth 
of October I was discharged. 

After working as cook for a short time for a com- 
pany that was constructing a railroad from Wil- 
mington to Los Angeles, I moved to the latter place 
and obtained employment in the Old Bella Union 
Hotel as chef. John King was the proprietor of the 
Bella Union. Until Christmas eve I stayed there, 
and then Sergeant John Curtis, of my company, who 



Rough and Tumble 45 

had been working as a saddler for Banning, a cap- 
italist in Wilmington, came back to the kitchen and 
said : 

"John, old sport, let's go to 'Frisco." 

"I haven't," I told him, ''enough change to set 'em 
up across the street, let alone go to 'Frisco." 

For answer Curtis pulled out a wallet, drew there- 
from a roll of bills that amounted to about $1,000, 
divided the pile into two halves, laid them on the 
table and indicated them with his forefinger. 

''John," he offered, "if you'll come with me you 
can put one of those piles in your pocket. What do 
you say?" 

Inasmuch- as I had had previously little oppor- 
tunity to really explore San Francisco, the idea ap- 
pealed to me and we shook hands on the bargain. 
Christmas morning, fine, cloudless and warm, found 
us seated on the San Jose stage. San Jose then was 
nearly as large a place as Tucson is now — about 
twenty odd thousand, if I remember rightly. The 
stage route carried us through the mission coun- 
try now so widely exploited by the railroads. 
Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Monterey were 
all towns on the way, Monterey being probably the 
largest. The country was very thinly occupied, 
chiefly by Spanish haciendas that had been in the 
country long before gold was discovered. The few 
and powerful owners of these estates controlled 
practically the entire beautiful State of California 
prior to '49, and at the time I write of still retained 



46 Arizona's Yesterday 

a goodly portion of it. They grew rich and power- 
ful, for their lands were either taken by right of con- 
quest or by grants from the original Mexican gov- 
ernment, and they paid no wages to their peons. 
These Spaniards, with the priests, however, are to 
be credited with whatever progress civilization made 
in the early days of California. They built the first 
passable roads, they completed rough surveys and 
they first discovered the wonderful fertility of the 
California soils. The towns they built were built 
solidly, with an eye to the future ravages of earth- 
quakes and of Time, which is something the modern 
builder often does not do. There are in many of 
their pueblos old houses built by the Spaniards in 
the middle part of the eighteenth century which are 
still used and occupied. 

We arrived in San Francisco a few days after our 
departure from Los Angeles, and before long the 
city had done to us what she still does to so many — 
had broken us on her fickle wheel of fortune. It 
wasn't many days before we found ourselves, our 
''good time" a thing of the past, ''up against it." 

"John," said Curtis, finally, "we're broke. We 
can't get no work. What'U we do?" 

I thought a minute and then suggested the only 
alternative I could think of. "Let's get a blanket," 
I offered. 

"Getting a blanket" was the phrase commonly in 
use when men meant to say that they intended to 
enlist. Curtis met the idea with instant approval, if 



Rough and Tumble 47 

not with acclamation, and, suiting the action to the 
words, we obtained a hack and drove to the Pre- 
sidio, where we underwent the examination for artil- 
lerymen. Curtis passed easily and was accepted, but 
I, owing to a wound in my ankle received during the 
war, was refused. 

Curtis obtained the customary three days' leave 
before joining his company and for that brief space 
we roamed about the city, finishing our "good time" 
with such money as Curtis had been able to raise by 
paw^ning and selling his belongings. After the 
three days were over we parted, Curtis to join his 
regiment; and since then I have neither seen nor 
heard of him. If he still chances to be living, my 
best wishes go out to him in his old age. 

For some time I hung around San Francisco try- 
ing to obtain employment, without any luck. I was 
not then as skillful a gambler as I became in after 
years, and, in any case, I had no money with which 
to gamble. It was, I found, one thing to sit down to 
a monte deck at a table surrounded with people you 
knew, where your credit was good, and another to 
stake your money on a painted wheel in a great hall 
where nobody cared whether you won or lost. 

Trying to make my little stake last as long as pos- 
sible, I roomed in a cheap hotel — the old What 
Cheer rooming house, and ate but one "two-bit" 
meal a day. I was constantly on the lookout for 
work of some kind, but had no luck until one day 
as I was passing up Kearney street I saw a sign in 



48 Arizona^s Yesterday 

one of the store windows calling for volunteers for 
the Sloop-o'-War Jamestown. After reading the 
notice a couple of times I decided to enlist, did so, 
was sent to Mare Island Navy Yard and from there 
boarded the Jamestown. 

It was on that vessel that I performed an action 
that I have not since regretted, however reprehen- 
sible it may seem in the light of present-day ethics. 
Smallpox broke out on board and I, fearful of con- 
tracting the dread disease, planned to desert. This 
would probably not have been possible today, when 
the quarantine regulations are so strict, but in those 
days port authorities were seldom on the alert to 
prevent vessels with diseases anchoring with other 
shipping, especially in Mexico, in the waters of 
which country we were cruising. 

When we reached Mazatlan I went ashore in the 
ordinary course of my duties as ward-room steward 
to do some marketing and take the officers' laundry 
to be washed. Instead of bringing the marketing 
back to the ship I sent it, together with a note telling 
where the laundry would be found, and saying good- 
bye forever to my shipmates. The note written and 
dispatched, I quietly ''vamoosed," or, as I believe it 
is popularly termed in the navy now, I 'Svent over 
the hill." 

My primary excuse for this action was, of course, 
the outbreak of smallpox, which at that time and in 
fact until very recently, was as greatly dreaded as 
bubonic plagtie is now, and probably more. Vac- 



Rough and Tumble 49 

cination, whatever may be its value in the prevention 
of the disease, had not been discovered in the sense 
that it is now understood and was not known at all 
except in the centers of medical practice in the East. 

Smallpox then was a mysterious disease, and cer- 
tainly a plague. Whole populations had been wiped 
out by it, doctors had announced that there was 
practically no cure for it and that its contraction 
meant almost certain death, and I may thus be ex- 
cused for my fear of the sickness. I venture to state, 
moreover, that if all the men aboard the Jamestown 
had had the same opportunity that I was given to 
desert, they would have done so in a body. 

My second excuse, reader, if one is necessary, is 
that in the days of the Jamestown and her sister 
ships, navy life was very different from the navy life 
of today, when I understand generous paymasters 
are even giving the jackies ice-cream with their 
meals. You may be entirely sure that we got noth- 
ing of the kind. Our food was bad, our quarters 
were w^orse, and the discipline was unbearably 
severe. 



THROUGH MEXICO AND BACK TO ARI- 
ZONA 

''Know thou the spell of the desert land, 

Where Life and Love are free? 
Knozv thou the lure the sky and sand 

Hath for the man in met" 

WHEN I deserted from the sloop-o'-war 
Jamestown it was v/ith the no uncertain 
knowledge that it was distinctly to my 
best advantage to clear out of the city of Mazatlan 
just as rapidly as I could, for the ships of the free 
and (presumably) enlightened Republic had not yet 
swerved altogether from the customs of the King's 
Navee, one of which said customs was to hang de- 
serters at the yard-arm. Sometimes they shot them, 
but I do not remember that the gentlemen most con- 
cerned had any choice in the matter. At any rate, 
I know that it was with a distinct feeling of relief 
that I covered the last few yards that brought me 
out of the city of Mazatlan and into the open coun- 
try. In theory, of course, the captain of the sloop- 
o'-war Jamestown could not have sent a squad of 
men after me with instructions to bring me back off 
foreign soil dead or alive, but in practice that is just 
what he would have done. Theory and practice 
have a habit of differing, especially in the actions of 
an irate skipper who sees one of his best w^ard-room 
stewards vanishing from his jurisdiction. 



Through Mexico to Arizona 51 

Life now opened before me with such a vista of 
possibiHties that I felt my breath taken away. Here 
was I, a youth twenty-two years old, husky and 
sound physically, free in a foreign country which I 
felt an instant liking for, and no longer beholden to 
the Stars and Stripes for which I was quite ready to 
fight but not to serve in durance vile on a plague- 
ship. My spirit bounded at the thought of the liberty 
that was mine, and I struck northward out of Mazat- 
lan with a light step and a lighter heart. At the edge 
of the city I paused awhile on a bluff to gaze for the 
last time on the Bay, on the waters of which rode 
quietly at anchor the vessel I had a few hours before 
quit so unceremoniously. There was no regret in 
my heart as I stood there and looked. I had no par- 
ticular love for Mexico, but then I had no particular 
love for the sea, either, and a good deal less for the 
ships that sailed the sea. So I turned my back very 
definitely on that part of my life and set my face 
toward the north, where, had I known it, I was to 
find my destiny beneath the cloudless turquoise skies 
of Arizona. 

When I left Mazatlan it was with the intention 
of walking as far as I could before stopping, or until 
the weight of the small bundle containing my 
worldly possessions tired my shoulders. But it was 
not to be so. Only two miles out of the city I came 
upon a ranch owned by two Americans, the sight of 
whom was very welcome to me just then. I had no 
idea that I should find anv American ranchers in the 



52 Arizona's Yesterday 

near neighborhood, and considered myself in luck. 
I found that one of the American's names was Col- 
onel Elliot and I asked him for work. Elliot sized 
me up, invited me in to rest up, and on talking with 
him I found him to be an exceedingly congenial soul. 
He was an old Confederate colonel — was Elliot, but 
although we had served on opposite sides of the sad 
war of a few years back, the common bond of na- 
tionality that is always strongest beyond the con- 
fines of one's own land prevented us from feeling 
any aloofness toward each other on this account. 
To me Colonel Elliot was an American, and a mighty 
decent specimen of an American at that — a friend 
in need. And to Colonel Elliot also I was an Amer- 
ican, and one needing assistance. We seldom spoke 
of our political differences, partly because our lives 
speedily became too full and intimate to admit of 
the petty exchange of divergent views, and partly 
because I had been a boy during the Civil War and 
my youthful brain had not been sufficiently mature 
to assimilate the manifold prejudices, likes, dislikes 
and opposing theories that w^ere the heritage of 
nearly all those who lived during that bloody four 
years' war. 

I have said that Colonel Elliot was a friend in 
need. There is an apt saying that a ''friend in need 
is a friend indeed," and such was Colonel Elliot as 
I soon found. For I had not been a week at the 
ranch when I was struck down with smallpox, and 
throughout that dangerous sickness, lasting several 



Through Mexico to Arizona 53 

weeks, the old Colonel, careless of contagion, nursed 
me like a woman, finally bringing me back to a 
point where I once again had full possession of all 
my youthful health and vigor. 

I do not just now recall the length of time I 
worked for Elliot and his partner, but the stay, if 
not long, was most decidedly pleasant. I grew to 
speak Spanish fluently, haunted the town of Mazat- 
lan (from which the Jamestown had long since de- 
parted), and made as good use generally of my tem- 
porary employment as was possible. I tried hard to 
master the patois of the peon as well as the flowery 
and eloquent language of the aristocracy, for I knew 
well that should I at any time seek employment as 
overseer at a rancho either in Mexico or Arizona, a 
knowledge of the former would be indispensable, 
while a knowledge of the latter was at all times use- 
ful in Mexico, especially in the cities, where the pos- 
session of the cultured dialect marked one for spe- 
cial favors and secured better attention at the stores. 

The Mexicans I grew to understand and like more 
and more the longer I knew them. I found the 
average Mexican gentleman a model of politeness, 
a Beau Brummel in dress and an artist in the use of 
the flowery terms with which his splendid language 
abounds. The peons also I came to know and un- 
derstand. I found them a simple-minded, uncom- 
plaining class, willingly accepting the burdens which 
were laid on them by their masters, the rich land- 
lords; and living, loving and playing very much as 



54 Arizona's Yesterday 

children. They were good-hearted — these Mexi- 
cans, and hospitable to the last degree. This, indeed, 
is a characteristic as truly of the Mexican of today 
as of the period of which I speak. They would, if 
needs be, share their last crust with you even if you 
were an utter stranger, and many the time some 
lowly peon host of mine would insist on my occupy- 
ing his rude bed whilst he and his family slept on 
the roof! Such warm-hearted simplicity is very 
agreeable, and it was a vast change from the world 
of the Americans, especially of the West, where the 
watchword was : ''Every man for himsel', and the 
de'il tak' the hindmost." It may be remarked here 
that the de'il often took the foremost, too ! 

When I left the hospitable shelter of Colonel El- 
liot's home I moved to Rosario, Sinaloa, where was 
situated the famous Tajo mine which has made the 
fortunes of the Bradbury family. It was owned 
then by Don Luis Bradbury, senior, the same Brad- 
bury wlhose son is now such a prominent figure in 
the social and commercial life of San Francisco and 
Los Angeles. I asked for work at the Bradbury 
mine, obtained it, and started in shoveling refuse 
like any other common laborer at the munificent 
wage of ten dollars per week, which was a little less 
than ten dollars more than the Mexican peons labor- 
ing at the same work obtained. I had not been 
working there long, however, when some sugges- 
tions I made to the engineer obtained me recognition 
and promotion, and at the end of a year, when I 



Through Mexico to Arizona 55 

quit, I was earning $150 per month, or nearly four 
times what my wage had been when I started. 

And then — and then, I beheve it w^as the spell of 
the Arizona plains that gripped the strings of my 
soul again and caused them to play a different 
tune. ... Or was it the prospect of an exciting 
and more or less lawless life on the frontier that 
beckoned with enticing lure? I do not know. But 
I grew to think more and more of Arizona, the Ter- 
ritory in which I had reached my majority and had 
found my manhood; and more and more I discov- 
ered myself longing to be back shaking hands with 
my old friends and companions, and shaking, too, 
dice with Life itself. So one day saw me once more 
on my way to the wild and free Territory, although 
this time my road did not lie wholly across a burn- 
ing and uninhabited desert. 

It is a hard enough proposition now to get to the 
United States from Mazatlan, or any other point in 
Mexico, when the Sud Pacifico and other railroads 
are shattered in a dozen places and their schedules, 
those that have them, are dependent on the magna- 
nimity of the various tribes of bandits that infest the 
routes; but at the time I wTite of it was harder. 

To strike north overland was possible, though not 
to be advised, for brigands infested the cedar forests 
of Sinaloa and southern Sonora; and savage Yaquis, 
quite as much to be feared as the Apaches of further 
north, ravaged the desert and mountain country. I 
solved the difficulty finally by going to Mazatlan 



56 Arizona's Yesterday 

and shipping from that port as a deck-hand on a 
Dutch brigantine, which I remember because of its 
exceptionally vile quarters and the particularly dirty 
weather we ran up against on our passage up the 
Gulf. The Gulf of California, especially the mouth 
of it, has always had an evil reputation among 
mariners, and with justness, but I firmly believe the 
elements out-did themselves in ferocity on the trip 
I refer to. 

Guaymas reached, my troubles were not over, for 
there was still the long Sonora desert to be crossed 
before the haven of Hermosillo could be reached. 
At last I made arrangements with a freighting outfit 
and went along with them. I had had a little money 
when I started, but both Mazatlan and Guaymas 
happened to be chiefly filled with cantinas and 
gambling-hells, and as I was not averse to frequent- 
ing either of these places of first resort to the lonely 
wanderer, my money-bag was considerably depleted 
when at last I arrived in the beautiful capital of 
Sonora. I was, in fact, if a few odd dollars are 
excepted, broke, and work was a prime necessity. 
Fortunately, jobs were at that time not very hard 
to find. 

There was at that time in Hermosillo a house 
named the Casa Marian Para, kept by one who 
styled himself William Taft. The Casa Marian 
Para will probably be remembered in Hermosillo by 
old-timers now — in fact, I have my doubts that it is 
not still standing. It was the chief stopping-house 



Through Mexico to Arizona 57 

in Sonera at that time. I obtained employment from 
Taft as a cook, but stayed with it only long enough 
to procure myself a "grub-stake," after which I ''hit 
the grit" for Tucson, crossing the border on the 
Nogales trail a few days later. I arrived in Tucson 
in the latter part of the year 1870, and obtained 
work cooking for Charlie Brown and his family. 

It was while I was employed as chef in the Brown 
household that I made — and lost, of course, a for- 
tune. No, it wasn't a very big fortune, but it was a 
fortune certainly very curiously and originally made. 
I made it by selling ham sandwiches ! 

Charlie Brown owned a saloon not far from the 
Old Church Plaza. It was called Congress Hall, 
had been completed in 1868 and was one of the most 
popular places in town. Charlie was fast becoming 
a plutocrat. One night in the saloon I happened to 
hear a man come in and complain because there 
wasn't a restaurant in town that would serve him a 
light snack at that time of night except at outrageous 
prices. 

^'That's right," said another man near me, ''if 
somebody would only have the sense to start a lunch- 
counter here the way they have them in the East 
he'd make all kinds of money." 

The words suggested a scheme to me. The next 
day I saw Brown and got his permission to serve a 
light lunch of sandwiches and coffee in the saloon 
after I had finished my work at the house. Just at 
that time there was a big crowd in the town, the first 



58 Arizona's Yesterday 

cattle having arrived in charge of a hungry lot of 
Texan cowpunchers, and everyone was making 
money. I set up my little lunch counter, charged 
seventy-five cents, or ''six-bits" in the language of 
the West, for a lunch consisting of a cup of coffee 
and a sandwich, and speedily had all the customers I 
could handle. For forty consecutive nights I made a 
clear profit of over fifty dollars each night. Those 
sandwiches were a mint. And they were worth what 
I charged for them, too, for bacon, ham, cofTee and 
the other things were 'way up, the three mentioned 
being fifty or sixty cents a pound for a very indiffer- 
ent quality. 

Sometimes I had a long line waiting to buy 
lunches, and all the time I ran that lunch stand I 
never had one "kick" at the prices or the grub 
offered. Those cowboys were well supplied with 
money, and they were more than willing to spend it. 
Charlie Brown was making his fortune fast. 

After I quit Brown's employ, John McGee — the 
same man who now is secretary of the Arizona Pio- 
neers' Historical Society and a well-known resident 
of Tucson — hired myself and another man to do 
assessment work on the old Salero mine, which had 
been operated before the war. Our conveyance was 
an old ambulance owned by Lord & Williams, who, 
as I have said, kept the only store and the postoffice 
in Tucson. The outfit was driven by "Old Bill" 
Snififen, who will doubtless be remembered by many 
Arizona pioneers. We picked up on the way "Old 



Through Mexico to Arizona 59 

Man" Benedict, another familiar character, who kept 
the stage station and ranch at Sahuarita, where the 
Twin Buttes Railroad now has a station and branch 
to some mines, and where a smelter is located. We 
were paid ten dollars per day for our work and re- 
turned safely to Tucson. 

I spoke of Lord & Williams' store just now. 
When in the city of Tucson recently I saw that Mr. 
Corbett has his tin shop where the old store and post- 
office was once. I recognized only two other build- 
ings as having existed in pioneer days, although 
there may be more. One was the old church of 
San Augustine and the other was part of the Orn- 
dorff Hotel, where Levin had his saloon. There 
were more saloons than anything else in Tucson in 
the old days, and the pueblo richly earned its repu- 
tation, spread broadcast all over the world, as being 
one of the ''toughest" places on the American 
frontier. 

Tucson was on the boom just then. Besides the 
first shipment of cattle, and the influx of cowboys 
from Texas previously mentioned, the Territorial 
capital had just been moved to Tucson from Pres- 
cott. It was afterwards moved back again to Pres- 
cott, and subsequently to the new to^v'n of Phoenix; 
but more of that later. 

After successfully concluding the assessment work 
and returning to Tucson to be paid off by McGee I 
decided to move again, and this time chose Wicken- 
burg, a little place between Phoenix and Prescott, 



60 Arizona's Yesterday 

and one of the pioneer towns of the Territory. 
West of Wickenburg on the Colorado River was 
another settlement named Ehrenberg, after a man 
who deserves a paragraph to himself. 

Herman Ehrenberg was a civil engineer and sci- 
entist of exceptional talents who engaged in mining 
in the early days of Arizona following the occupa- 
tion of the Territory by the Americans. He was of 
German birth and, coming at an early age to the 
United States, made his way to New Orleans, where 
he enlisted in the New Orleans Grays when war 
broke out betw^een Mexico and Texas. After serv- 
ing in the battles of Goliad and Fanning' s Defeat he 
returned to Germany and wrote and lectured for 
some time on Texas and its resources. Soon after 
the publication of his book on Texas he returned to 
the United States and at St. Louis, in 1840, he 
joined a party crossing to Oregon. From that Ter- 
ritory he went to the Sandwich Islands and for some 
years wandered among the islands of the Polyne- 
sian Archipelago, returning to California in time to 
join General Fremont in the latter's attempt to free 
California from Mexican rule. After the Gadsden 
Purchase he moved to Arizona, where, after years 
of occupation in mining and other industries, he was 
killed by a Digger Indian at Dos Palmas in South- 
ern California. The town of Ehrenberg was named 
after him.* 



*This information relative to Ehrenberg is taken largely 
from The History of Arizona; De Long, 1905. 



STAGE DRIVER'S LUCK 

God, men call Destiny : Hear thee my prayer! 

Grant that life's secret for e'er shall he kept. 
Wiser than mine is thy will; I dare 

Not dust zvhere thy broom hath szvept. 

— ^WOON. 

I HAVE said that Wickenburg was a small place 
half-way between Phoenix and Prescott, but 
that is not quite right. Wickenburg was sit- 
uated between Prescott and the valley of the Salt 
River, in the fertile midst of which the foundation 
stones of the future capital of Arizona had yet to 
be laid. To be sure, there were a few shacks on the 
site, and a few ranchers in the valley, but the city 
of Phoenix had yet to blossom forth from the wil- 
derness. I shall find occasion later to speak of the 
birth of Phoenix, however. 

When I arrived in Wickenburg from Tucson — 
and the journey was no mean affair, involving, as 
it did, a ride over desert and mountains, both of 
which were crowded with hostile Apaches — I went 
to Work as stage driver for the company that oper- 
ated stages out of Wickenburg to Ehrenberg, Pres- 
cott and other places, including Florence which was 
just then beginning to be a town. 

Stage driving in Arizona in the pioneer days was 
a dangerous, difficult, and consequently high-priced 



62 Arizona^'s Yesterday 

job. The Indians were responsible for this in the 
main, although white highwaymen became some- 
what numerous later on. Sometimes there would be 
a raid, the driver would be killed, and the stage 
would not depart again for some days, the company 
being unable to find a man to take the reins. The 
stages were large and unwieldy, but strongly built. 
They had to be big enough to hold off raiders should 
they attack. Every stage usually carried, besides 
the driver, two company men who went heavily 
armed and belted around with numerous cartridges. 
One sat beside the driver on the box-seat. In the 
case of the longer stage trips two or three men 
guarded the mail. Very few women traveled in 
those days — in fact, there were not many white 
women in the Territory and those who did travel 
usually carried some masculine protector with them. 
A man had to be a good driver to drive a stage, too, 
for the heavy brakes were not easily manipulated 
and there w'ere some very bad stretches of road. 

Apropos of what I have just said about stage 
drivers being slain, and the difficulty sometimes ex- 
perienced in getting men to take their places, I re- 
member that on certain occasions I wiould take the 
place of the mail driver from Tucson to Apache 
Pass, north of where Douglas now is — the said mail 
driver having been killed — get fifty dollars for the 
trip and blow it all in before I started for fear I 
might not otherwise get a chance to spend it. 

The stage I drove for this Wickenburg company 



Stage Driver's Luck 63 

was one that ran regular trips out of Wickenburg. 
Several trips passed without much occurring worthy 
of note; and then on one trip I fell off the box, injur- 
ing my ankle. When I arrived back in Wickenburg 
I was told by Manager Pierson of the company that 
I would be relieved from driving the stage because 
my foot was not strong enough to work the heavy 
brakes, and would be given instead the buckboard 
to drive to Florence and back on postoffice business. 

The next trip the stage made out of Wickenburg, 
therefore, I remained behind. A few miles from 
town the stage was held up by an overwhelming 
force of Apaches, the driver and all save two of the 
passengers massacred, and the contents looted. A 
woman named Moll Shepherd, going back East 
with a large sum of money in her possession, and a 
man named Kruger, escaped the Indians, hid in the 
hills and were the only two who survived to tell the 
story of what has gone down into history as the 
famous ''W^ickenburg Stage Massacre." I shudder 
now to think how nearly I might have been on the 
box on that fatal trip. 

I was not entirely to escape the Apaches, however. 
On the first return trip from Florence to Wicken- 
burg with the buckboard, while I was congratulating 
myself and thanking my lucky stars for the accident 
to my ankle. Apaches ''jumped" the buckboard and 
gave me and my one passenger, Charlie Block of 
Wickenburg, a severe tussle for it. We beat them 
off in the end, owing to superior marksmanship, and 



64 Arizona's Yesterday 

arrived in Wickenburg unhurt. Block was part 
owner of the Barnett and Block store in Wickenburg 
and was a well-known man in that section. 

After this incident I determined to quit driving 
stages and buckboards and, casting about for some 
newi line of endeavor, went for the first time into the 
restaurant business for myself. The town needed 
an establishment of the kind I put up, and as I had 
always been a good cook I cleaned up handsomely, 
especially as it was while I was running the restau- 
rant that Miner started his notorious stampede, 
when thousands of gold-mad men followed a will-o'- 
the-wisp trail to fabulously rich diggings which 
turned out to be entirely mythical. 

It was astonishing how little was required in those 
days to start a stampede. A stranger might come in 
town with a ''poke" of gold dust. He would nat- 
urally be asked where he had made the strike. As 
a matter of fact, he probably had washed a dozen 
different streams to get the poke-full, but under the 
influence of liquor he might reply: ''Oh, over on 
the San Carlos," or the San Pedro, or some other 
stream. It did not require that he should state how 
rich the streak was, or whether it had panned out. 
All that was necessary to start a mad rush in the 
direction he had designated was the sight of his gold 
and the magic word "streak." Many were the trails 
that led to death or bitter disappointment, in Ari- 
zona's early days. 

Most of the old prospectors did not see the results 



Stage Driver's Luck 65 

of their own '^strikes" nor share in the profits from 
them after their first ''poke" had been obtained. 
There was old John Waring, for instance, who 
found gold on a tributary of the Colorado and blew 
into Arizona City, got drunk and told of his find : 

''Gold— Gold. . . . Lots 'v it !" he informed 
them, drunkenly, incoherently, and woke up the next 
morning to find that half the town had disappeared 
in the direction of his claim. He rushed to the reg- 
istry ofiice to register his claim, which he had fool- 
ishly forgotten to do the night before. He found it 
already registered. Some unscrupulous rascal had 
filched his secret, even to the exact location of his 
claim, from the aged miner and had got ahead of 
him in registering it. No claim is really legal until 
it is registered, although in the mining camps of the 
old days it was a formality often dispensed with, 
since claim jumpers met a prompt and drastic pun- 
ishment. 

In many other instances the big mining men gob- 
bled up the smaller ones, especially at a later period, 
when most of the big mines were grouped under a 
few large managements, with consequent great ad- 
vantage over their smaller competitors. 

Indeed, there is comparatively little incentive now 
for a prospector to set out in Arizona, because if he 
chances to stumble on a really rich prospect, and 
attempts to work it himself, he is likely to be so 
browbeaten that he is finally forced to sell out to 
some large concern. There are only a few smelters 



66 Arizona's Yesterday 

in or near the State and these are controlled by large 
mining companies. Very well; we will suppose a 
hypothetical case : 

A, being a prospector, finds a copper mine. He 
says to himself: "Here's a good property; it ought 
to make me rich. I won't sell it, I'll hold on to it 
and work it myself." 

So far, so good. 

A starts in to work his mine. He digs therefrom 
considerable rich ore. And now a problem presents 
itself. 

He has no concentrator, no smelter of his own. 
He cannot afford to build one; therefore it is per- 
fectly obvious that he cannot crush his own ore. He 
must, then, send it elsewhere to be smelted, and to 
do this must sell his ore to the smelter. 

In the meantime a certain big mining company 
has investigated A's find and has seen that it is rich. 
The company desires the property, as it desires all 
other rich properties. It offers to buy the mine for 
a sum far below its actual value. Naturally, the 
finder refuses. 

But he must smelt his ore. And to smelt it he 
finds he is compelled to sell it to a smelter that is 
controlled by the mining company whose offer he 
has refused. He sends his ore to the smelter. Back 
comes the quotation for his product, at a price ridic- 
ulously low. "That's what we'll give you," says the 
company, through its proxy the smelter, "take it or 
leave it," or words to that effect. 



Stage Driver's Luck 67 

Now, what can A do ? Nothing at all. He must 
either sell his ore at an actual loss or sell his mine 
to the company. Naturally, he does the latter, and 
at a figure he finds considerably lower than the first 
offer. The large concern has him where it wanted 
him and it snufTs out his dreams of wealth and pros- 
perity effectively. 

These observations are disinterested. I have 
never, curiously enough, heeded the insistent call of 
the diggings; I have never ''washed a pan," and my 
name has never appeared on the share-list of a mine. 
And this, too, has been in spite of the fact that often 
I have been directly in the paths of the various ex- 
citements. I have been always wise enough to see 
that the men who made rapid fortunes in gold were 
not the men who stampeded head-over-heels to the 
diggings, but the men who stayed behind and 
opened up some kind of business which the gold- 
seekers would patronize. These were the reapers of 
the harvest, and there was little risk in their game, 
although the stakes were high. 

I have said that I never owned a mining share. 
Well, I never did; but once I came close to owning 
a part share in what is now the richest copper mine 
on earth — a mine that, with the Anaconda in Mon- 
tana, almost determines the price of raw copper. I 
will tell you the tale. 

Along in the middle seventies — I think it was 74, 
I was partner with a man named George Stevens 
at Eureka Springs, west of Fort Thomas in the 



68 Arizona's Yesterday 

Apache country, a trading station for freighters. 
We were owners of the trading station, which was 
some distance south of where the copper cities of 
Globe and Miami are now situated. We made very 
good money at the station and Stevens and I decided 
to have some repairs and additions built to the store. 
We looked around for a mason and finally hired 
one named George Warren, a competent man whose 
only fault was a fondness for the cup that cheers. 

Warren was also a prospector of some note and 
had made several rich strikes. It was known that, 
while he had never found a bonanza, wherever he 
announced ''pay dirt" there ''pay dirt" invariably 
was to be found. In other words, he had a reputa- 
tion for reliability that was valuable to him and of 
which he was intensely vain. He was a man with 
"hunches," and hunches curiously enough, that 
almost always made good. 

These hunches w^ere more or less frequent with 
Warren. They usually came when he was broke 
for, like all prospectors, Warren found it highly 
inconvenient ever to be the possessor of a large sum 
of money for any length of time. He had been 
known to say to a friend : "I've got a hunch !" dis- 
appear, and in a week or two, return with a liberal 
amount of dust. Between hunches he worked at his 
trade. 

When he had completed his work on the store at 
Eureka Springs for myself and Stevens, Warren 
drew me aside one night and, very confidentially, in- 



Stage Driver's Luck 69 

formed me that he had a hunch. "You're wel- 
come to it, George," I said, and, something calhng 
me away at that moment, I did not hear of him 
again until I returned from New Fort Grant, 
whither I had gone with a load of hay for which we 
had a valuable contract with the government. Then 
Stevens informed me that Warren had told him of 
his hunch, had asked for a grub-stake, and, on being 
given one, had departed in a southerly direction with 
the information that he expected to make a find over 
in the Dos Cabezas direction. 

He was gone several weeks, and then one day 
Stevens said to me, quietly : 

''John, Warren's back." 

"Yes?" I answered. "Did he make a strike?" 

"He found a copper mine," said Stevens. 

"Oh, only copper!" I laughed. "That hunch sys- 
tem of his must have got tarnished bv this time, 
then!" 

You see, copper at that time was worth next to 
nothing. There was no big smelter in the Territory 
and it was almost impossible to sell the ore. So it 
was natural enough that neither myself nor Stevens 
should feel particularly jubilant over Warren's 
strike. One day I thought to ask Warren whether 
he had christened his mine yet, as was the custom. 

"I'm going to call it the 'Copper Queen,' " he said. 

I laughed at him for the name, but admitted it a 
good one. That mine today, reader, is one of the 
greatest copper properties in the world. It is worth 



70 Arizona's Yesterday 

about a billion dollars. The syndicate that owns it 
owns as w^ell a good slice of Arizona. 

''Syndicate?" I hear you ask. ''Why, what about 
Warren, the man who found the mine, and Stevens, 
the man who grub-staked him?" 

Ah ! What about them ! George Stevens bet his 
share of the mine against $75 at a horse race one 
day, and lost; and George Warren, the man with 
the infallible hunch, died years back in squalid 
misery, driven there by drink and the memory of 
many empty discoveries. The syndicate that ob- 
tained the mine from Warren gave him a pension 
amply sufficient for his needs, I believe. It is but fair 
to state that had the mine been retained by Warren 
the probabilities are it would never have been devel- 
oped, for Warren, like other old prospectors, was a 
genius at finding pay-streaks, but a failure when it 
came to exploiting them. 

That, reader, is the true story of the discovery of 
the Copper Queen, the mine that has made a dozen 
fortunes and two cities — Bisbee and Douglas. If I 
had gone in with Stevens in grub-staking poor War- 
ren would I, too, I wonder, have sold my share for 
some foolish trifle or recklesssly gambled it away? 
I w^onder! Probably, I should. 



A FRONTIER BUSINESS MAN 

''The chip of chisel, hum of sazv, 

The stones of progress laid; 
The city grew, and, helped by its law. 

Men many fortunes made." 

— Song of the City, by T. Burgess. 

A PHOENIX man was in Patagonia recently 
and — I don't say he was a typical Phoenix 
man — commented in a superior tone on the 
size of the town. 

''Why," he said, as if it clinched the argument, 
'Thoenix would make ten Patagonias." 

''And then some," I assented, "but, sonny, I built 
the third house in Phoenix. Did you know that? 
And I burnt Indian grain fields in the Salt River 
Valley long before anyone ever thought of building 
a city there. Even a big city has had some time to 
be a small one." 

That settled it; the Phoenix gentleman said no 
more. 

I told him only the exact truth when I said that I 
built the third house in Phoenix. 

After I had started the Wickenburg restaurant 
came rumors that a new city was to be started in the 
fertile Salt River Valley, between Sacaton and Pres- 
cott, some forty or fifty miles north of the former 
place. Stories came that men had tilled the land of 



72 Arizona's Yesterday 

the valley and had found that it would grow almost 
anything, as, indeed, it has since been found that 
any land in Arizona will do, providing the water is 
obtained to irrigate it. One of Arizona's most won- 
derful phenomena is the sudden greening of the 
sandy stretches after a heavy rain. One day every- 
thing is a sun-dried brown, as far as the eye can see. 
Every arroyo is dry, the very cactus seems shriveled 
and the deep blue of the sky gives no promise of any 
relief. Then, in the night, thunder-clouds roll up 
from the painted hills, a tropical deluge resembling 
a cloud-burst falls, and in the morning — lo ! where 
was yellow sand parched from months of drought, 
is now sprouting green grass! It is a marvelous 
transformation — a miracle never to be forgotten by 
one who has seen it. 

How^ever, irrigation is absolutely necessary to till 
the soil in most districts of Arizona, though in some 
sections of the State dry farming has been success- 
fully resorted to. It has been said that Arizona has 
more rivers and less wiater than any state in the 
Union, and this is true. Many of these are rivers 
only in the rainy season, which in the desert gen- 
erally comes about the middle of July and lasts until 
early fall. Others are what is known as ''sinking 
rivers," flowing above ground for parts of their 
courses, and as frequently sinking below the sand, 
to reappear further along. The Sonoita, upon which 
Patagonia is situated, is one of these ''disappearing 
rivers," the water coming up out of the sand about 



A Frontier Business Man 73 

half a mile from the main street. The big rivers, 
the Colorado, the Salt, the upper Gila and the San 
Pedro, run the year around, and there are several 
smaller streams in the more fertile districts that do 
the same thing. 

The larger part of the Arizona ''desert" is not 
barren sand, but fertile silt and adobe, needing only 
water to make of it the best possible soil for farming 
purposes. Favored by a mild winter climate the 
Salt River Valley can be made to produce crops of 
some kind each month in the year — fruits in the fall, 
vegetables in the winter season, grains in spring and 
alfalfa, the principal crop, throughout the summer. 
A succession of crops may oftentimes be grown dur- 
ing the year on one farm, so that irrigated lands in 
Arizona yield several times the produce obtainable 
in the Eastern states. Alfalfa may be cut six or 
seven times a year with a yield of as much as ten 
tons to the acre. The finest Egyptian cotton, free 
from the boll weevil scourge, may also be growin 
successfully and is fast becoming one of the staple 
products of the State. Potatoes, strawberries, pears, 
peaches and melons, from temperate climates; and 
citrus fruits, sorghum grains and date palms from 
subtropical regions, give some idea of the range of 
crops possible here. Many farmers from the East- 
ern and Southern states and from California, find- 
ing this out, began to take up land, dig irrigating 
ditches and make homes in Arizona. 

Fifteen or twenty pioneers had gone to the Salt 



74 Arizona^s Yesterday 

River Valley while I was at Wickenburg and there 
had taken up quarter sections on which they raised, 
chiefly, barle}^ wheat, corn and hay. A little fruit 
was also experimented in. Some of the men who 
were on the ground at the beginning I remember to 
have been Dennis and Murphy, Tom Gray, Jack 
Walters, Johnny George, George Monroe, Joe Fugit, 
Jack Swilling, Patterson, the Parkers, the Sorrels, 
the Fenters and a few others whose names I do not 
recall. A towEnsite had been laid out, streets sur- 
veyed, and before long it became known that the 
Territory had a new city, the name of which was 
Phoenix. 

The story of the way in. which the name "Phoe- 
nix" was given to the city that in future days was 
to become the metropolis of the State, is interesting. 
When the Miner excitement was over I decided to 
move to the new Salt River townsite, and soon after 
my arrival there attended a meeting of citizens gath- 
ered together to name the new city. Practically 
every settler in the Valley was at this meeting, 
which was destined to become historic. 

Among those present was a Frenchman named 
Barrel Dupper, or Du Perrd, as his name has some- 
times been written, who was a highly educated man 
and had lived in Arizona for a number of years. 
When the question of naming the townsite came up 
several suggestions were offered, among them being 
"Salt City," ''Aricropolis," and others. Dupper 
rose to his feet and suggested that the city be called 



A Frontier Business Man 75 

Phoenix, because, he explained, the Phoenix was a 
bird of beautiful plumage and exceptional voice, 
which lived for five hundred years and then, after 
chanting its death-song, prepared a charnel-house 
for itself and was cremated, after which a new and 
glorified bird arose from the ashes to live a magnifi- 
cent existence forever. When Dupper finished his 
suggestion and explanation the meeting voted on the 
names and the Frenchman's choice was decided 
upon. "Phoenix" it has been ever since. 

Before I had been in Phoenix many days I com- 
menced the building of a restaurant, which I named 
the Capital Restaurant. The capital was then at 
Prescott, having been moved from Tucson, but my 
name evidently must have been prophetic, for the 
capital city of Arizona is now none other than Phoe- 
nix, which at the present day probably has the larg- 
est population in the State — over twenty thousand. 

Soon I gained other interests in Phoenix besides 
the restaurant. The Capital made me much money, 
and I invested what I did not spend in ''having a 
good time," in various other enterprises. I went 
into the butcher business with Steel & Coplin. I 
built the first bakery in Phoenix. I staked two men 
to a ranch north of the city, from which I later on 
proceeded to flood the Territory with sweet potatoes. 
I was the first man, by the way, to grow sweet pota- 
toes in Arizona. I built a saloon and dance hall, 
and in this, naturally, was my quickest turnover. 

I am not an apologist, least of all for myself, and 



76 Arizona's Yesterday 

as this is the true story of a hfe I beHeve to have 
been exceptionally varied I think that in it should 
be related the things I did which might be consid- 
ered "bad" nowadays, as well as the things I did 
which, by the same token, present-day civilization 
may consider "good." 

I may relate, therefore, that for some years I was 
known as the largest liquor dealer in the Territory, 
as well as one of the shrewdest hands at cards. 
Although I employed men to do the work, often 
players would insist on my dealing the monte deck 
or laying down the faro lay-out for them. I played 
for big stakes, too — bigger stakes than people play 
for nowadays in the West. Many times I have sat 
down with the equivalent of thousands of dollars in 
chips and played them all away, only to regain them 
again without thinking it anything particularly 
unusual. As games go, I was considered "lucky" 
for a gambler. Though not superstitious, I believed 
in this luck of mine, and this is probably the 
reason that it held good for so long. If of late 
various things, chiefly the mining depression, have 
made my fortunes all to the bad, I am no man to 
whine at the inevitable. I can take my ipecac along 
with the next man ! 

There were few men in the old days in Phoenix, 
or, indeed, the entire Territory, who did not drink 
liquor, and lots of it. In fact, it may be said that 
the entire fabric of the Territory was constructed 
on liquor. The pioneers were most of them whiskey 



THE OLD WARD HOMESTEAD, WHERE CADY KEPT STORE 
DURING THE BUILDING OF THE SANTA FE RAILROAD 



A Frontier Business Man 17 

fiends, as were the gamblers. By this I am not de- 
fending the Hquor traffic. I have sold more liquor 
than any man in Arizona over the bar in my life- 
time, but I voted dry at the last election and I adhere 
to the belief that a whiskey-less Arizona will be the 
best for our children and our children's children. 

During my residence in Phoenix Barrel D'Upper, 
the man who had christened the town, became one 
of my best friends. He kept the post and trading 
store at Desert Station, at which place was the 
only water to be found between Phoenix and Wick- 
enburg, if I remember correctly. The station made 
him wealthy. Dupper was originally Count Du 
Perre, and came of a noted aristocratic French 
family. His forefathers were, I believe, prominent 
in the court of Louis XIV. When a young man he 
committed some foolhardy act in France and was 
banished by his people, w'lo sent him a monthly 
remittance on condition that he get as far away from 
his home as he could, and stay there. To fulfill the 
terms of this agreement Du Perre came to Arizona 
among the early pioneers and soon proved that he 
had the stuff of a real man in him. He learned 
English and Americanized his name to Dupper. He 
engaged in various enterprises and finally started 
Desert Station, where he made his fortune. 

He was a curious character as he became older. 
Sometimes he would stay away from Phoenix for 
several months and then one day he would appear 
with a few thousand dollars, more or less, spend 



78 Arizona's Yesterday 

every cent of it in treating the boys in my house and 
"blow back" home again generally in my debt. He 
used to sing La Marseillaise — it was the only song 
he knew — and after the first few drinks would sol- 
emnly mount a table, sing a few verses of the mag- 
nificent revolutionary song, call on me to do like- 
wise, and then "treat the house." Often he did this 
several times each night, and as "treating the house" 
invariably cost at least thirty dollars and he was an 
inveterate gambler, it will be seen that in one way or 
another I managed to secure considerable of old 
Dupper's fortune. His partiality to the Marseillaise 
leads me to the belief that he was banished for par- 
ticipation in one of the French revolutions; but this 
I cannot state positively. 

On one occasion I remember that I was visiting 
with Dupper and we made a trip together some- 
where, Dupper leaving his cook in charge. When 
we returned nobody noticed us and I happened to 
look through a window before entering the house. 
Hastily I beckoned to Dupper. 

The Frenchman's cook was sitting on his bed 
with a pile of money — the day's takings — in front 
of him. He was dividing the pile into two halves. 
Taking one bill off the pile he would lay it to one 
side and say : 

"This is for Dupper." 

Then he'd take the next bill, lay it in another spot, 
and say: 

"And this is for me." 



A Frontier Business Man 79 

We watched him through the window unnoticed 
until he came to the last ten-dollar bill. It was odd. 
The cook deliberated a few moments and finally put 
the bill on top of the pile he had reserved for him- 
self. Then Dupper, whose face had been a study in 
emotions, could keep still no longer. 

''Hey, there!" he yelled, "p^^y ^^i^' — P^^Y ^^i^- 
Divvy up that ten spot !" 

What happened afterwards to that cook I don't 
remember. But Dupper was a good sport. 



VENTURES AND ADVENTURES 

Hush! What brooding stillness is hanging over all? 
Whafs this talk in zMspers, and that placard on 

the wall? 
Aha! I see it now! They're going to hang a man! 
Judge Lynch is on the ramparts and the Laii/s an 

''Also-Ran!" — Woon. 

READER, have you ever seen the look in a 
man's eyes after he has been condemned by 
that Court of Last Appeal — his fellows-men ? 
I have, many times. It is a look without a shadow 
of hope left, a look of dread at the ferocity of the 
mob, a look of fear at what is to come afterwards; 
and seldom a hint of defiance lurks in such a man's 
expression. 

I have seen and figured in many lynchings. In 
the old days they were the inseparables, the Frontier 
and Judge Lynch. If a white man killed a Mexican 
or Indian nothing was done, except perhaps to hold 
a farce of a trial with the killer in the end turned 
loose; and if a white man killed another white man 
there was seldom much outcry, unless the case was 
cold-blooded murder or the killer was already unpop- 
ular. But let a Mexican or an Indian lift one finger 
against a white man and the whole strength of the 
Whites was against him in a moment; he was 
hounded to his hole, dragged forth, tried by a com- 



Ventures and Adventures 81 

mittee of citizens over whom Judge Lynch sat with 
awful solemnity, and was forthwith hung. 

More or less of this was in some degree necessary. 
The killing of an Apache was accounted a good day's 
work, since it probably meant that the murderer of 
several white men had gone to his doom. To kill a 
Mexican only meant that another "bad hombre" had 
gone to his just deserts.' 

And most of the Mexicans in Arizona in the early 
days were ''bad hombres" — there is no doubt about 
that. It was they who gave the Mexican such a bad 
name on the frontier, and it was they who first 
earned the title "greaser." They were a murderous, 
treacherous lot of rascals. 

In the Wickenburg stage massacre, for instance, 
it was known that several Mexicans were involved — 
wood-choppers. One of these Mexicans was hunted 
for weeks and was caught soon after I arrived in 
Phoenix. I was running my dance hall when a 
committee of citizens met in a mass-meeting and 
decided that the law was too slow in its working 
and gave the Mexican too great an opportunity to 
escape. The meeting then resolved itself into a 
hanging committee, broke open the jail, seized the 
prisoner from the arms of the sheriff and hung him 
to the rafters just inside the jail door. That done, 
they returned to their homes and occupations satis- 
fied that at least one "Greaser" had not evaded the 
full penalty of his crimes. 

Soon after a Mexican arrived in town with a 



82 Arizona^s Yesterday 

string of cows to sell. Somebody recognized the 

cows as ones that had belonged to a rancher named 

Patterson. The Mexican was arrested by citizens 

and a horseman sent out to investigate. Patterson 

was found killed. At once, and with little ceremony, 

the Mexican with the cattle w^as "strung up" to the 

cross of a gatepost, his body being left to sway in 

the wind until somebody came along with sufficient 

decency to cut it down. 

Talking about lynchings, reminds me of an inci^ 

dent that had almost slipped my mind. Before 1 

went to Wickenberg from Tucson I became partners 

with a man named Robert Swope in a bar and 

gambling lay-out in a little place named Adamsville, 

a few miles below w^here Florence now is on the 

Gila River. Swope was tending bar one night when 

an American shot him dead and got awa)^ The 

murderer was soon afterward captured in Tucson 

and lynched in company with tw^o Mexicans who 

were concerned in the murder of a pawnbroker 

there. 

^ ^ ^ ^ 

In Phoenix I married my first wife, whose given 
name was Ruficia. Soon afterwards I moved to 
Tucson, where, after being awarded one child, I had 
domestic trouble which ended in the courts. My wife 
finally returned to Phoenix and, being free again, 
married a man named Murphy. After this experi- 
ence I determined to take no further chances with 
matrimony. However, I needed a helpmate, so I 



Ventures and Adventures 83 

solved the difficulty by marrying Paola Ortega by 
contract for five years. Contract marriages were 
universally recognized and indulged in in the West 
of the early days. My relations with Paola were 
eminently satisfactory until the expiration of the 
contract, when she went her way and I mine. 

Before I leave the subject of Phoenix it will be 
well to mention that when I left I sold all my prop- 
erty there, consisting of some twenty-two lots, all 
in the heart of the city, for practically a song. Six 
of these lots were situated where now is a big 
planing mill. Several lots I sold to a German for a 
span of mules. The German is alive today and lives 
in Phoenix a Wealthy man, simply because he had 
the foresight and acumen to do what I did not do — 
hang on to his real estate. If I had kept those 
twenty-two lots until now, without doing more than 
simply pay my taxes on them, my fortune today 
would be comfortably up in the six figures. How- 
ever, I sold the lots, and there's no use crying over 
spilled milk. Men are doing today all over the 
world just what I did then. 

I had not been in Tucson long before I built there 
the largest saloon and dance-hall in the Territory. 
Excepting for one flyer in Florence, which I shall 
speak of later on, this was to be my last venture into 
the liquor business. My hall was modeled after 
those on the Barbary Coast. It cost ''four-bits" and 
drinks to dance, and the dances lasted only a few 
minutes. At one time I had thirteen Mexican girls 



84 Arizona's Yesterday 

dancing in the hall, and this number w'as increased 
on special days until the floor was crowded. 1 
always did good business — so good, in fact, that 
jealousy aroused in the minds of my rivals finally 
forced me out. Since then, as I have said, with the 
single Florence exception, I have not been in the 
dance-hall business, excepting that I now have at 
some expense put a ball-room into my hotel at Pata- 
gonia, in which are held at times social dances which 
most of the young folk of the county attend, the 
liquor element being entirely absent, of course.* 

Besides paying a heavy license for the privilege 
of selling liquor in my Tucson dance hall, I was 
compelled every morning, in addition, to pay over 
$5 as a license for the dance-hall and $1.50 col- 
lector's fees, which, if not paid out every morning as 
regularly as clockwork, wtould have threatened my 
business. I did not complain of this tax; it was a 
fair one considering the volume of trade I did. But 
my patronage grew and grew until there came a day 
when ''Cady's Place," as it was known, was making 
more money for its owner than any similar estab- 
lishment in Arizona. The saloon-keepers in Tucson 
became inordinately jealous and determined to put 
an end to my ''luck," as they called it. Accordingly, 
nine months after I had opened my place these gen- 
tlemen used their influence quietly with the Legis- 
lature and ''jobbed" me. The license was raised for 



*Since this was written the State has abolished the sale 
of liquor from within its boundaries. 



Ventures and Adventures 85 

dance halls at one bound to $25 per night. This was 
a heavier tax than even my business would stand, so 
I set about at once looking for somebody on whom 
to unload the property. I claim originality, if not a 
particular observance of ethics, in doing this. 

One day a man came along and, when he saw the 
crowd in the hall, suggested that I sell him a share 
in the enterprise. 

*'No," I replied, 'T'll not sell you a share; but, to 
tell you the truth, I'm getting tired of this business, 
and want to get out of it for good. I'll sell you the 
whole shooting-match, if you want to buy. Suppose 
you stay tonight with my barkeep and see what kind 
of business I do." 

He agreed and I put two hundred dollars in my 
pocket and started around town. I spent that two 
hundred dollars to such good purpose that that night 
the hall was crowded to the doors. The prospective 
purchaser looked on with blinking eyes at the 
thought of the profits that must accrue to the owner. 
Would he buy the place? Would he? Well, say — 
he was so anxious to buy it that he wanted to pass 
over the cash when he saw me counting up my 
takings in the small hours of the morning. The 
takings were, I remember, $417. But I told him 
not to be in a hurry, to go home and sleep over the 
proposition and come back the next day. 

After he had gone the collector came around, took 
his $26.50 and departed. On his heels came my 
man. 



86 Arizona's Yesterday 

"Do you still want to buy?" I asked him. 

"You bet your sweet life I want to buy," he 
replied. 

"You're sure you've investigated the proposition 
fully?" I asked him. 

The customer thought of that four hundred and 
seventeen dollars taken in over the bar the night 
before and said he had. 

"Hand over the money, then," I said, promptly. 
"The place is yours." 

The next morning he came to me with a lugu- 
brious countenance. 

"Well," I greeted him, "how much did you make 
last night?" 

"Took in ninety-six dollars," he answered, sadly. 
"Cady, why didn't you tell me about that $25 tax?" 

"Tell you about it?" I repeated, as if astonished. 
"Why, didn't I ask you if you had investigated the 
thing fully ? Did I ask you to go into the deal blind- 
fold? It wiasn't my business to tell you about any 
tax." 

And with that he had to be content. 



I was now out of the dance-hall business for good, 
and I looked about for some other and more prosaic 
occupation to indulge in. Thanks to the deal I had 
put through with the confiding stranger with the 
ready cash, I was pretty well "heeled" so far as 
money went, and all my debts were paid. Finally I 



Ventures and Adventures 87 

decided that I would go into business again and 
bought a grocery store on Mesilla street. 

The handing out of canned tomatoes and salt soda 
crackers, however, speedily got on my nerves. I 
was still a comparatively young man and my restless 
spirit longed for expression in some new environ- 
ment. About this time Paola, my contract-wife, 
w^ho was everything that a wife should be in my 
opinion, became a little homesick and spoke often of 
the home she had left at Sauxal, a small gulf-coast 
port in Lower California. Accordingly, one morn- 
ing, I took it into my head to take her home on a 
visit to see her people, and, the thought being always 
father to the action with me, I traded my grocery 
store for a buckboard and team and some money, 
and set forth in this conveyance for Yuma. This 
was a trip not considered so very dangerous, except 
for the lack of water, for the Indians along the route 
were mostly peaceable and partly civilized. Only 
for a short distance out of Tucson did the Apache 
hold suzerainty, and this only when sufficient Papa- 
gos, whose territory it really was, could not be mus- 
tered together in force to drive them off. The 
Papago Indians hated the Apaches quite as much as 
the white man did, for the Papago lacked the 
stamina and fighting qualities of the Apache and in 
other characteristics was an entirely different type 
of Indian. I have reason to believe that the Apaches 
were not originally natives of Arizona, but were an 
offshoot of one of the more ferocious tribes further 



88 Arizona's Yesterday 

north. This I think because, for one thing, the 
facial characteristics of the other Arizona Indians — 
the Pimas, Papagos, Yumas, Maricopas, and others 
— are very similar to each other but totally different 
from those of the various Apache tribes, as was the 
language they spoke. The Papagos, Pimas, Yumas, 
Maricopas and other peaceable Indian peoples were 
of a settled nature and had lived in their respective 
territories for ages before the white man came to 
the West. The Apache, on the other hand, was a 
nomad, with no definite country to call his own and 
recognizing no boundary lines of other tribes. It 
was owing to Apache depredations on the Papagos 
and Pimas that the latter were so willingly enlisted 
on the side of the White man in the latter's fight 
for civilization. 

Reaching Yuma without any event to record that I 
remember, we took one of the Colorado River boats 
to the mouth of the Colorado, where transfers were 
made to the deep-sea ships plying between the Colo- 
rado Gulf and San Francisco. One of these steam- 
ers, which were creditable to the times, we took to 
La Paz. At La Paz Paola was fortunate enough to 
meet her padrina, or godfather, who furnished us 
with mules and horses with which we reached 
Sauxal, Paola's home. There we stayed with her 
family for some time. 

While staying at Sauxal I went to a fiesta in the 
Arroyo San Luis and there began playing cooncan 
with an old rancher who was accounted one of the 



Ventures and Adventures 89 

most wealthy inhabitants of the country. I won 
from him two thousand oranges, five gallons of 
wine, seventeen buckskins and two hundred heifers. 
The heifers I presented to Paola and the buckskins 
I gave to her brothers to make leggings out of. The 
wine and oranges I took to La Paz and sold, netting 
a neat little sum thereby. 

Sixty miles from La Paz was El Triunfo, one of 
the best producing silver mines in Lower California, 
managed by a man named Blake. Obeying an im- 
pulse I one day went out to the mine and secured a 
job, working at it for some time, and among other 
things starting a small store which was patronized 
by the company's workmen. Growing tired of this 
occupation, I returned to Sauxal, fetched Paola and 
with her returned to Yuma, or Arizona City, where 
I started a small chicken ranch a few miles up the 
river. Coyotes and wolves killed my poultry, how- 
ever, and sores occasioned by ranch work broke out 
on my hands, so I sold the chicken ranch and moved 
to Arizona City, opening a restaurant on the main 
street. In this cafe I made a specialty of pickled 
feet — not pig's feet, but bull's feet, for which deli- 
cacy I claim the original creation. It was some 
dish, too! They sold like hot-cakes. 

While I was in Lower California I witnessed a 
sight that is well worth speaking of. It was a Mex- 
ican funeral, and the queerest one I ever saw; or 
expect to see, though I have read of Chinese funer- 
als that perhaps approach it in peculiarity. It was 



90 ■ Arizona's Yesterday 

while on my way back to Sauxal from La Paz that 
I met the cortege. The corpse was that of a wealthy 
rancher's wife, and the coffin was strung on two long 
poles borne by four men. Accompanying the coffin 
alongside of those carrying it were about two hun- 
dred horsemen. The bearers kept up a jog-trot, 
never once faltering on the way, each horseman 
taking his turn on the poles. When it became a 
man's turn to act as bearer nobody told him, but he 
slipped off his horse, letting it run wherever it 
pleased, ran to the coffin, ducked under the pole and 
started with the others on the jog-trot, While the 
man whose place he had taken caught his horse. 
Never once in a carry of 150 miles did that coffin 
stop, and never once did that jog-trot falter. The 
cortege followers ate at the various ranches they 
passed, nobody thinking of refusing them food. The 
150 mile journey to San Luis was necessary in order 
to reach a priest who would bury the dead woman. 
All the dead were treated in the same manner. 

While I was in Yuma the railroad reached Dos 
Palmas, Southern California, and one day I went 
there with a wagon and bought a load of apples, 
which, with one man to accompany me, I hauled all 
the way to Tucson. That wagon-load of apples was 
the first fruit to arrive in the Territory and it was 
hailed with acclaim. I sold the lot for one thousand 
dollars, making a profit well over fifty per cent. 
Then with the wagon I returned to Yuma. 

On the way, as I was nearing Yuma, I stopped at 



Ventures and Adventures 91 

Canyon Station, which a man named Ed. Lumley 
kept. Just as we drove up an old priest came out 
of Lumley's house crying something aloud. We 
hastened up and he motioned inside. Within wfe 
saw poor Lumley dead, with both his hands slashed 
off and his body bearing other marks of mutilation. 
It turned out that two Mexicans to whom Lumley 
had given shelter had killed him because he refused 
to tell them where he kept his money. The Mex- 
icans were afterwards caught in California, taken 
to Maricopa county and there, after trial by the usual 
method, received the just penalty for their crime. 
From Yuma I moved to Florence, Arizona, where 
I built a dance-hall and saloon, which I sold almost 
immediately to an Italian named Gendani. Then I 
moved back to Tucson, my old stamping-ground. 



INDIAN WARFARE 

When strong men fought and loved and lost, 
And might zvas right throughout the land; 

When life zvas zvine and zmne zvas life, 

And God looked dozvn on endless strife; 

Where murder, lust and hate zvere rife, 
What footprints Time left in the sand! 

— WOON. 

IN THE seventies and early eighties the hostility 
of the various Apache Indian tribes was at its 
height, and there was scarcely a man in the 
Territory who had not at some time felt the dread 
of these implacable enemies. 

By frequent raids on emigrants' wagons and on 
freighting outfits, the Indians had succeeded in arm- 
ing themselves fairly successfully with the rifle of 
the white man; and they kept themselves in ammu- 
nition by raids on lonely ranches and by "jumping" 
or ambushing prospectors and lone travelers. If a 
man was outnumbered by Apaches he often shot 
himself, for he knew that if captured he w<ould prob- 
ably be tortured by one of the fiendish methods made 
use of by these Indians. If he had a woman with 
him it was an act of kindness to shoot her, too, for 
to her, also, even if the element of torture were 
absent, captivity with the Indians would invariably 
be an even sadder fate. 



Indian Warfare 93 

Sometimes bands of whites would take the place 
of the soldiers and revenge themselves on Apache 
raiders. There was the raid on the Wooster ranch, 
for instance. This ranch was near Tubac. Wooster 
lived alone on the ranch with his wife and one hired 
man. One morning Apaches sw*ooped down on the 
place, killed Wooster and carried off his wife. As 
she has never been heard of since it has always been 
supposed that she was killed. This outrage resulted 
in the famous ''Camp Grant Massacre," the tale of 
which echoed all over the world, together with indig- 
nant protests from centers of culture in the East 
that the whites of Arizona were ''more savage" than 
the savages themselves. I leave it to the reader to 
judge whether this was a fact. 

The Wooster raid and slaughter was merely the 
culminating tragedy of a series of murders, robberies 
and depredations carried on by the Apaches for 
years. Soldiers would follow the raiders, kill a few 
of them in retaliation, and a few days later another 
outrage would be perpetrated. The Apaches were 
absolutely fearless in the warfare they carried on 
for possession of what they, rightly or wrongly, 
considered their invaded territory. The Apache 
with the greatest number of murders to his name 
was most highly thought of by his tribe. 

When the Wooster raid occurred I was in Tucson. 
Everybody in Tucson knew Wooster and liked him. 
There was general mourning and a cry for instant 
revenge when his murder was heard of. For a long 



94 Arizona's Yesterday 

time it had been believed that the Indians wintering 
on the government reservation at Camp Grant, at 
the expense of Uncle Sam, were the authors of the 
numerous raids in the vicinity of Tucson, though 
until that time it had been hard to convince the 
authorities that such was the case. This time, how- 
ever, it became obvious that something had to be 
done. 

The white men of Tucson held a meeting, at 
which I was present. Sidney R. De Long, first 
Mayor of Tucson, was also there. After the meet- 
ing had been called to order De Long rose and said : 

"Boys, this thing has got to be stopped. The 
military won't believe us when we tell them that 
their charity to the Indians is our undoing — that the 
government's wards are a pack of murderers and 
cattle thieves. What shall we do?" 

"Let the military go hang, and the government, 
too !" growled one man, "Old Bill" Oury, a consid- 
erable figure in the life of early Tucson, and an ex- 
Confederate soldier. 

The meeting applauded. 

"We can do what the soldiers won't," I said. 

"Right!" said Oury, savagely. "Let's give these 
devils a taste of their own medicine. Maybe after a 
few dozen of 'em are killed they'll learn some respect 
for the white man." 

Nobody vetoed the suggestion. 

The following day six white men — myself, De 
Long and fierce old Bill Oury among them, rode out 



Indian Warfare 95 

of Tucson bound for Tubac. With us we had three 
Papago Indian trailers. Arrived at the Wooster 
ranch the Papagos were set to work and followed a 
trail that led plain as daylight to the Indian camp at 
Fort Grant. A cry escaped all of us at this justifica- 
tion of our suspicions. 

"That settles it!" ground out Oury, between his 
set teeth. 'Tt's them Injuns or us. And — it won't 
be us." 

We returned to Tucson, rounded up a party con- 
sisting of about fifty Papagos, forty-five Mexicans 
and ourselves, and set out for Camp Grant. We 
reached the fort at break of day, or just before, and 
before the startled Apaches could fully awaken to 
what was happening, or the near-by soldiers gather 
their wits together, eighty-seven Aravaipa Apaches 
had been slain as they lay. The Papagos accounted 
for most of the dead, but we six white men and our 
Mexican friends did our part. It was bloody work; 
but it was justice, and on the frontier then the whites 
made their own justice. 

All of us were arrested, as a matter of course, and 
when word reached General Sherman at Washing- 
ton from the commander of the military forces at 
Fort Grant, an order was issued that all of us were 
to be tried for murder. We suffered no qualms, for 
we knew that according to frontier standards what 
we had done was right, and would inevitably have 
been done some time or another by somebody. We 
were tried in Judge Titus' Territorial Court, but, to 



96 Arizona's Yesterday 

the dismay of the military and General Sherman, 
who of course knew nothing of the events that had 
preceded the massacre, not a man in the jury could 
be found who would hang us. The Territory was 
searched for citizens impartial enough to adjudge 
the slaying of a hostile Apache as murder, but none 
could be found. The trial turned out a farce and 
we were all acquitted, to receive the greatest demon- 
stration outside the courtroom that men on trial 
for their lives ever received in Arizona, I think. 
One thing that made our acquittal more than certain 
was the fact, brought out at the trial, that the dress 
of Mrs. Wooster and a pair of moccasins belonging 
to her husband were found on the bodies of Indians 
whom we killed. Lieutenant Whitman, who was in 
command at Fort Grant, and on whom the responsi- 
bility for the conduct of the Indians wintering there 
chiefly rested, was soon after relieved from duty 
and transferred to another post. General George 
Crook arrived to take his place late in 1871. The 
massacre had occurred on the last day of April of 
that year. 

Other raids occurred. Al Peck, an old and valued 
friend of mine, had several experiences with the 
Apaches, which culminated in the Peck raid of April 
27, 1886, when Apaches jumped his ranch, killed his 
wife and a man named Charles Owens and carried 
off Peck's niece. Apparently satisfied with this, 
they turned Peck loose, after burning the ranch 
house. The unfortunate man's step-niece was found 



Indian Warfare 97 

some six weeks later by Mexican cowpunchers in 
the Cocoapi Mountains in Old Mexico. 

The famous massacre of the Samaniego freight 
teams and the destruction of his outfit at Cedar 
Springs, between Fort Thomas and Wilcox, was 
witnessed by Charles Beck, another friend of mine. 
Beck had come in with a quantity of fruit and was 
unloading it when he heard a fusilade of shots 
around a bend in the road. A moment later a boy 
came by helter-skelter on a horse. 

''Apaches!" gasped the boy, and rode on. 

Beck waited to hear no more. He knew that to 
attack one of Samaniego's outfits there must be at 
least a hundred Indians in the neighborhood. Un- 
hitching his horse, he jumped on its back and rode 
for dear life in the direction of Eureka Springs. 
Indians sighted him as he swept into the open and 
followed, firing as they rode. By luck, however, 
and the fact that his horse was fresher than those of 
his pursuers, Beck got safely away. 

Thirteen men were killed at this Cedar Springs 
massacre and thousands of dollars' worth of freight 
was carried off or destroyed. The raid was unex- 
pected owing to the fact that the Samaniego brothers 
had contracts with the government and the stuff in 
their outfit was intended for the very Indians con- 
cerned in the ambuscade. One of the Samaniegos 
was slain at this massacre. 

Then there was the Tumacacori raid, at Barnett's 
ranch in the Tumacacori Mountains, when Charlie 



98 Arizona^'s Yesterday 

Murray and Tom Shaw were killed. Old Man 
Frenchy, as he was called, suffered the severe loss 
of his freight and teams when the Indians burned 
them up across the Cienega. Many other raids 
occurred, particulars of which are not to hand, but 
those I have related will serve as samples of the 
work of the Indians and will show just how it was 
the Apaches gained the name they did of being veri- 
table fiends in human form. 



After the expiration of my contract with Paola 
Ortega I remained in a state of single blessedness 
for some time, and then married Gregoria Sosa, in 
the summer of 1879. Gregoria rewarded me with 
one child, a boy, who is now living in Nogales. On 
December 23, 1889, Gregoria died and in October, 
1890, I married my present wife, whose maiden 
name was Donna Paz Paderes, and who belongs to 
an old line of Spanish aristocracy in Mexico. We 
are now living together in the peace and contentment 
of old age, well occupied in bringing up and pro- 
viding for our family of two children, Mary, who 
will be twenty years old on February 25, 1915, and 
Charlie, who will be sixteen on the same date. Both 
our children, by the grace of God, have been spared 
us after severe illnesses. 

;j< ^; ^ i|; 

To make hundreds of implacable enemies at one 
stroke is something any man would very naturally 



Indian Warfare 99 

hesitate to do, but I did just that about a year after 
I commenced working for D. A. Sanford, one of the 
biggest ranchers betw^een the railroad and the bor- 
der. The explanation of this lies in one word — 
sheep. 

If there was one man whom cattlemen hated with 
a fierce, unreasoning hatred, it was the man who ran 
sheep over the open range — a proceeding perfectly 
legal, but one which threatened the grazing of the 
cattle inasmuch as where sheep had grazed it was 
impossible for cattle to feed for some weeks, or until 
the grass had had time to grow again. Sheep crop 
almost to the ground and feed in great herds, close 
together, and the range after a herd of sheep has 
passed over it looks as if somebody had gone over 
it with a .law^nmower. 

In 1881 I closed out the old Sanford ranch stock 
and was informed by my employer that he had fore- 
closed a mortgage on 13,000 head of sheep owned 
by Tully, Ochoa and De Long of Tucson. This firm 
was the biggest at that time in the Territory and the 
De Long of the company was one of the six men 
who led the Papagos in the Camp Grant Massacre. 
He died in Tucson recently and I am now the only 
white survivor of that occurrence. Tully, Ochoa 
and De Long were forced out of business by the 
coming of the railroad in 1880, which cheapened 
things so much that the large stock held by the com- 
pany was sold at prices below what it had cost, 
necessitating bankruptcy. 



100 Arizona's Yesterday 

I was not surprised to hear that Sanford intended 
to run sheep, though I wiU admit that the informa- 
tion was scarcely welcome. Sheep, however, at that 
time were much scarcer than cattle and fetched, con- 
sequently, much higher prices. My employer, D. A. 
Sanford, who now lives in Washington, D. C, was 
one of the shrewdest business men in the Territory, 
and wlas, as well, one of the best-natured of men. 
His business acumen is testified to by the fact that 
he is now sufficiently wealthy to count his pile in the 
seven figures. 

Mr. Sanford's wishes being my own in the mat- 
ter, of course, I did as I was told, closed out the 
cattle stock and set the sheep grazing on the range. 
The cattlemen were angry and sent me an ultimatum 
to the effect that if the sheep were not at once taken 
off the grass there would be ''trouble." I told them 
that Sanford was my boss, not them; that I would 
take his orders and nobody else's, and that until he 
told me to take the sheep off the range they'd stay 
precisely where they were. 

My reply angered the cattlemen more and before 
long I became subject to many annoyances. Sheep 
w'ere found dead, stock was driven off, my ranch 
hands were shot at, and several times I myself nar- 
rowly escaped death at the hands of the enraged 
cattlemen. I determined not to give in until I 
received orders to that effect from Mr. Sanford, but 
I will admit that it was with a feeling of distinct 
relief that I hailed those orders when they came 



Indian Warfare 101 

three years later. For one thing, before the sheep 
business came up, most of the cattlemen who were 
now my enemies had been my close friends, and it 
hurt me to lose their esteem. I am glad to say, how- 
ever, that most of these cattlemen and cowboys, who, 
when I ran sheep, would cheerfully have been re- 
sponsible for my funeral, are my very good friends 
at the present time; and I trust they will always 
remain so. Most of them are good fellows and I 
have always admitted that their side had the best 
argument. 

In spite of the opposition of the cattlemen I made 
the sheep business a paying one for Mr. Sanford, 
clearing about $17,000 at the end of three years. 
When that period had elapsed I had brought shear- 
ers to Sanford Station to shear the sheep, but was 
stopped in my intention with the news that Sanford 
had sold the lot to Pusch and Zellweger of Tucson. 
I paid off the men I had hired, satisfied them, and 
thus closed my last deal in the sheep business. One 
of the men, Jesus Mabot, I hired to go to the Rodeo 
with me, while the Chinese gardener hired another 
named Fernando. 

Then occurred that curious succession of fatalities 
among the Chinamen in the neighborhood that 
puzzled us all for years and ended by its being im- 
possible to obtain a Chinaman to fill the last man's 
place. 



DEPUTY SHERIFF, CATTLEMAN AND 
FARMER 

You kin haroe yore Turner sunsets, — he never 

painted one 
Like th' Santa Rita Mountains at th' settin' o' th' 

sun ! 
You kin have yore Eastern cornfields, zmth th' crops 

that never change. 
Me — I've ail Arizona, and, best o' all, the Range! 

— WOON. 

ABOUT this time Sheriff Bob Paul reigned in 
Tucson and made me one of his deputies. 
I had numerous adventures in that capacity, 
but remember only one as being worth recording 
here. 

One of the toughest characters in the West at 
that time, a man feared throughout the Territory, 
was Pat Cannon. He had a score of killings to his 
credit, and, finally, when Paul became sheriff a war- 
rant was issued for his arrest on a charge of mur- 
der. After he had the warrant Paul came to me. 

"Cady," he said, '*'you know Pat Cannon, don't 
you?" 

*T worked with him once," I answered. 

*'Well," returned Paul, ''here's a warrant for his 
arrest on a murder charge. Go get him." 

I obtained a carryall and an Italian boy as driver, 



Sheriff^ Cattleman and Farmer 103 

in Tucson, and started for Camp Grant. Arrived 
there I was informed that it was beheved Cannon 
was at Smithy's wood camp, several miles away. 
We went on to Smithy's wood camp. Sure enough, 
Pat was there — very much so. He was the first man 
I spotted as I drove into the camp. Cannon was 
sitting at the door of his shack, two revolvers belted 
on him and his rifle standing up by the door at his 
side, within easy reach. I knew that Pat didn't 
know that I was a deputy, so I drove right up. 

"Hello," I called. "How's the chance for a game 
of poker?" 

"Pretty good," he returned, amiably. "Smithy'U 
be in in a few moments, John. Stick around — we 
have a game every night." 

"Sure," I responded, and descended. As I did 
so I drew my six-shooter and whirled around, aim- 
ing the weapon at him point blank. 

"Hands up, Pat, you son-of-a-gun," I said, and I 
guess I grinned. "You're my prisoner." 

I had told the Italian boy what to do, beforehand, 
and he now gave me the steel bracelets, which I 
snapped on Cannon, whose face bore an expression 
seemingly a mixture of intense astonishment and 
disgust. Finally, when I had him safely in the 
carryall, he spat out a huge chew of tobacco and 
swore. 

He said nothing to me for awhile, and then he 
remarked, in an injured way : 



104 Arizona^s Yesterday 

'*Wa-al, Johnny, I sure would never have thought 
it of you!" 

He said nothing more, except to ask me to twist 
him a cigarette or two, and when we reached Tucson 
I turned him over safely to Sheriff Paul. 

* * * * 

You who read this in your stuffy city room, or 
crowded subway seat, imagine, if you can, the fol- 
lowing scene: 

Above, the perfect, all-embracing blue of the Ari- 
zona sky; set flaming in the middle of it the sun, a 
glorious blazing orb whose beauty one may dare to 
gaze upon only through smoked glasses; beneath, 
the Range, which, far from being a desert, is cov- 
ered with a growth of grass which grows thicker 
and greener as the rivers' banks are reached. 

All around, Arizona — the painted hills, looking 
as though someone had carefully swept them early 
in the morning with a broom; the valleys studded 
with mesquite trees and greasewood and dotted here 
and there with brown specks which even the un- 
initiated will know are cattle, and the river, one of 
Arizona's minor streams, a few yards across and only 
a couple of feet deep, but swift-rushing, pebble- 
strew'd and clear as crystal. 

Last, but not least, a heterogeneous mob of cow- 
boys and vaqueros, with their horses champing at 
the bit and eager to be off on their work. In the 
foreground a rough, unpainted corral, where are 



Sheriff, Cattleman and Farmer 105 

more ponies — wicked-looking, intelligent little beg- 
gars, but quick turning as though they owned but 
two legs instead of four, and hence priceless for the 
work of the roundup. In the distance, some of them 
quietly and impudently grazing quite close at hand, 
are the cattle, the object of the day's gathering. 

Cowboys from perhaps a dozen or more ranches 
are gathered here, for this is the commencement of 
the Rodeo' — the roundup of cattle that takes place 
semi-annually. Even ranches whose cattle are not 
grazed on this particular range have representatives 
here, for often there are strays with brands that 
show them to have traveled many scores of miles. 
The business of the cowboys* is to round up and 
corral the cattle and pick out their own brands from 
the herd. They then see that the unbranded calves 
belonging, to cows of their brand are properly 
marked with the hot iron and with the ear-slit, 
check up the number of yearlings for the benefit of 
their employers, and take charge of such of the cat- 
tle it is considered advisable to drive back to the 
home ranch. 

So much sentimental nonsense has been talked of 
the cruelty of branding and slitting calves that it is 
worth while here, perhaps, to state positively that 
the branding irons do not penetrate the skin and 
serve simply to burn the roots of the hair so that 



*The term "cowpuncher" is not com,mon in Arizona as 
in Montana, but the Arizona cowboys are sometim,es 
called "vaqueros." 



106 Arizona^s Yesterday 

the bald marks will show to which ranch the calf 
belongs. There is little pain to the calf attached to 
the operation, and one rarely if ever even sees a 
calf licking its brand after it has been applied; and, 
as is well known, the cow's remedy for an injury, 
like that of a dog, is always to lick it. As to the 
ear-slitting, used by most ranches as a check on 
their brands, it may be said that if the human ear 
is somewhat callous to pain — as it is — the cow's ear 
is even more so. One may slice a cow's ear in half 
in a certain way and she will feel only slight pain, 
not sufficient to make her give voice. The slitting 
of a cow's ear draws very little blood. 

•While I am on the subject, — it was amusing to 
note the unbounded astonishment of the cattlemen 
of Arizona a few years ago when some altruistic 
society of Boston came forward with a brilliant idea 
that was to abolish the cruelty of branding cows 
entirely. What was the idea ? Oh, they were going 
to hang a collar around the cow's neck, with a brass 
tag on it to tell the name of the owner. Or, if that 
wasn't feasible, they thought that a simple ring and 
tag put through the cow's ear-lobe would prove 
eminently satisfactory ! The feelings of the cow- 
boys, when told that they would be required to dis- 
mount from their horses, walk up to each cow in 
turn and politely examine her tag, perhaps with the 
aid of spectacles, may be better imagined than de- 
scribed. It is sufficient to say that the New England 



Sheriff, Cattleman and Farmer 107 

society's idea never got further than Massachusetts, 
if it was, indeed, used there, which is doubtful. 

The brand is absolutely necessary as long as there 
is an open range, and the abolishment of the open 
range will mean the abandonment of the cow-ranch. 
At the time I am speaking of the whole of the Ter- 
ritory of Arizona was one vast open range, over 
the grassy portions of which cattle belonging to 
hundreds of different ranches roamed at will. Most 
of the big ranches employed a few cowboys the year 
around to keep the fences in repair and to prevent 
cows from straying too far from the home range. 
The home range was generally anywhere within a 
twenty-mile radius of the ranch house. 

The ear-slit was first found necessary because of 
the activities of the rustlers. There were two kinds 
of these gentry — the kind that owned ranches and 
passed themselves off as honest ranchers, and the 
open outlaws, who drove off cattle by first stam- 
peding them in the Indian manner, rushed them 
across the international line and then sold them to 
none too scrupulous Mexican ranchers. Of the two 
it is difficult to say which was the most dangerous 
or the most reviled by the honest cattlemen. The 
ranches within twenty or thirty miles of the border, 
perhaps, suffered more from the stampeders than 
from the small ranchers, but those on the northern 
ranges had constantly to cope with the activities of 
dishonest cattlemen who owned considerably more 



108 Arizona's Yesterday 

calves than they had cows, as a rule. The difficulty 
was to prove that these calves had been stolen. 

It was no difficult thing to steal cattle success- 
fully, providing the rustler exercised ordinaiy cau- 
tion. The method most in favor among the rustlers 
w^s as follows : For some weeks the rustler would 
ride the range, noting where cows with unbranded 
calves were grazing. Then, w^hen he had ascertained 
that no cowboys from neighboring ranches were 
riding that w^ay, he would drive these cows and 
their calves into one of the secluded and natural 
corrals with which the range abounds, rope the 
calves, brand them with his own brand, hobble and 
sometimes kill the mother cows to prevent them fol- 
lowing their offspring, and drive the latter to his 
home corral, where in the course of a few weeks 
they would forget their mothers and be successfully 
weaned. They would then be turned out to graze 
on the Range. Sometimes when the rustler did not 
kill the mother cow the calf proved not to have been 
successfully weaned, and went back to its mother — 
the worst possible advertisement of the rustler's 
dirty work. Generally, therefore, the mother cow 
was killed, and little trace left of the crime, for the 
coyotes speedily cleaned flesh, brand and all from 
the bones of the slain animal. The motto of most of 
these rustlers was : "A dead cow tells no tales !" 

Another method of the rustlers was to adopt a 
brand much like that of a big ranch near by, and 
to over-brand the cattle. For instance, a big ranch 




CADY AND HIS THIRD FAMILY, 1915 



Sheriff, Cattleman and Farmer 109 

with thousands of cattle owns the brand Cross-Bar 
(X — ). The rustler adopts the brand Cross L 
(XL) and by the addition of a vertical mark to 
the bar in the first brand completely changes the 
brand. It was always a puzzle for the ranchers 
to find brands that would not be easily changed. 
Rustlers engaged in this work invariably took grave 
chances, for a good puncher could tell a changed 
brand in an instant, and often knew every cow be- 
longing to his ranch by sight, without looking at 
the brand. When one of these expert cowboys 
found a suspicious brand- he lost no time hunting 
up proof, and if he found that there had actually 
been dirty work, the rustler responsible, if wise, 
would skip the country without leaving note of his 
destination, for in the days of which I speak the 
penalty for cow-stealing was almost always death, 
except when the sheriff happened to be on the spot. 
Since the sheriff was invariably heart and soul a 
cattleman himself, he generally took care that he 
wasn't anywhere in the neighborhood when a cattle 
thief met his just deserts. Even now this rule holds 
effect in the cattle lands. Only two years ago a 
prominent rancher in this country — the Sonoita 
Range — shot and killed a Mexican who with a part- 
ner had been caught red-handed in the act of steal- 
ing cattle. 

With the gradual disappearance of the open range, 
cattle stealing has practically stopped, although one 
still hears at times of cases of the kind, isolated. 



110 Arizona's Yesterday 

but bearing traces of the same old methods. Stam- 
peding is, of course, now done away with. 

During the years I worked for D. A. Sanford I 
had more or less trouble all the time with cattle 
thieves, but succeeded fairly well in either detecting 
the guilty ones or in getting back the stolen cattle. 
I meted out swift and sure justice to rustlers, and 
before long it became rumored around that it was 
wise to let cattle with the D.S. brand alone. The 
Sanford brand was changed three times. The D.S. 
brand I sold to the Vail interests for Sanford, and 
the Sanford brand was changed to the Dipper, 
which, afterwards, following the closing out of the 
Sanford stock, was again altered to the Ninety- 
Seven (97) brand. Cattle with the 97 brand on 
them still roam the range about the Sonoita. 

* * * * 

It was to a rodeo similar to the one which I have 
attempted to describe that Jesus Mabot and I de- 
parted following the incident of the selling of the 
sheep. We were gone a week. When we returned 
I put up my horse and was seeing that he had some 
feed when a shout from Jesus, whom I had sent to 
find the Chinese gardener to tell him we needed 
something to eat, came to my ears. 

"Oyez, Senor Cady !" Jesus was crying, ''El 
Chino muerte." 

I hurried down to the field where Mabot stood 
and found him gazing at the Chinaman, who was 



Sheriff, Cattleman and Farmer 111 

lying face downward near the fence, quite dead. 
By the smell and the general lay-out, I reckoned he 
had been dead some three days. 

I told Mabot to stay with him and, jumping on 
my horse, rode to Crittenden, where I obtained a 
coroner and a jury that would sit on the Chinaman's 
death. The next morning the jury found that he 
had been killed by some person or persons unknown, 
and let it go at that. 

Two weeks later I had occasion to go to Tucson, 
and on tying my horse outside the Italian Brothers' 
saloon, noticed a man I thought looked familiar 
sitting on the bench outside. As I came up he pulled 
his hat over his face so that I could not see it. I 
went inside, ordered a drink, and looked in the mir- 
ror. It gave a perfect reflection of the man outside, 
and I saw that he w^as the Mexican Fernando, whom 
the Chinese gardener had hired when I had engaged 
Mabot. I had my suspicions right then as to who 
had killed the Chinaman, but, having nothing by 
which to prove them, I was forced to let the matter 
drop. 

Two or three years after this I hired as vaquero 
a Mexican named Neclecto, who after a year quit 
work and went for a visit to Nogales. Neclecto 
bought his provisions from the Chinaman who kept 
the store I had built on the ranch, and so, as we 
were responsible for the debt, when Bob Bloxton, 
son-in-law of San ford, came to pay the Mexican 
off, he did so in the Chinaman's store. 



112 Arizona^s Yesterday 

The next morning Neclecto accompanied Bloxton 
to the train, and, looking back. Bob saw the Mex- 
ican and another man ride off in the direction of the 
ranch. After it happened Neclecto owned up that 
he had been in the Chinaman's that night drinking, 
but insisted that he had left without any trouble 
with the yellow-skinned storekeeper. But from that 
day onward the Chinaman was never seen again. 

Bloxton persuaded me to return to the ranch 
from Nogales and we visited the Chinaman's house, 
where we found the floor dug up as though some- 
body had been hunting treasure. My wife found 
a $10 goldpiece hidden in a crack between the 'dobe 
bricks and later my son, John, unearthed twelve 
Mexican dollars beneath some manure in the hen- 
coop. Whether this had belonged to the Chinaman, 
Louey, who had disappeared, or to another China- 
man who had been staying with him, we could not 
determine. At any rate, we found no trace of Louey 
or his body. 

Even this was not to be the end of the strange 
series of fatalities to Chinamen on the Sanford 
ranch. In 1897 I quit the Sanford foremanship 
after working for my employer seventeen years, and 
turned the ranch over to Amos Bloxton, another 
son-in-law of Sanford. I rented agricultural land 
from Sanford and fell to farming. Near my place 
Crazy John, a Chinaman, had his gardens, where 
he made 'dobe bricks besides growing produce. 

We were living then in the old store building and 



Sheriff^ Cattleman and Farmer 113 

the Chinaman was making bricks about a quarter 
of a mile away with a Mexican whom he employed. 
One day we found him dead and the Mexican gone. 
After that, as was natural, we could never persuade 
a Chinaman to live anywhere near the place. I later 
built a house of the bricks the Chinaman was 
making when he met his death. The Mexican 
escaped to Sonora, came back when he thought the 
affair had blown over and went to w^ork for the 
railroad at Sonoita. There he had a fracas with the 
section foreman, stabbed him and made off into the 
hills. Sheriff Wakefield from Tucson came down 
to get the man and shot him dead near Greaterville, 
which ended the incident. 

In the preceding I have mentioned the railroad. 
This w^as the Benson-Hermosillo road, built by the 
Santa Fe and later sold to the Southern Pacific, 
which extended the line to San Bias in Coahuila, 
and which is now in process of extending it further 
to the city of Tepic. I was one of those who helped 
survey the original line from Benson to Nogales — 
I think the date was 1883. 

In future times I venture to state that this road 
will be one of the best-paying properties of the 
Southern Pacific Company, which has had the cour- 
age and foresight to open up the immensely rich 
empire of Western Mexico. The west coast of 
Mexico is yet in the baby stage of its development. 
The revolutions have hindered progress there con- 
siderably, but when peace comes at last and those 



114 ' Arizona's Yesterday 

now shouldering arms for this and that faction in 
the Republic return to the peaceful vocations they 
owned before the war began, there is no doubt that 
the world will stand astonished at the riches of this, 
at present, undeveloped country. There are por- 
tions of the West Coast that have never been sur- 
veyed, that are inhabited to this day with peaceful 
Indians who have seldom seen a white face. The 
country is scattered with the ruins of wonderful 
temples and cathedrals and, doubtless, much of the 
old Aztec treasure still lies buried for some enter- 
prising fortune-seeker to unearth. There are also 
immense forests of cedar and mahogany and other 
hard woods to be cut; and extensive areas of land 
suitable for sugar planting and other farming to be 
brought under cultivation. When all this is opened 
up the West Coast cannot help taking its place as 
a wonderfully rich and productive region. 



IN AGE THE CRICKET CHIRPS AND 
BRINGS— 

A faltering step on life's highway, 

A grip on the bottom rung; 
A fezv good deeds done here and there, 

And my life's song is sung. 
It's not what you get in pelf that counts. 

It's not your time in the race. 
For most of ns draw the slower mounts. 

And onr deeds can't keep the pace. 
It's for each what he's done of kindness. 

And for each what he's done of cheer. 
That goes on the Maker's scorebook 

With each succeeding year. 

— WooN. 

WHILE I was farming on the Sanford ranch 
a brother-in-law of D. A. Sanford, Frank 
Lawrence by name, came to Hve with me. 
Frank was a splendid fellow and we were fast 
friends. 

One day during the Rodeo we were out where 
the vaqueros were working and on our return found 
our home, a 'dobe house, burned down, and all our 
belongings with it, including considerable pro- 
visions. My loss was slight, for in those days I 
owned a prejudice against acquiring any more 
worldly goods than I could with comfort pack on 



116 Arizona's Yesterday 

my back; but Frank lost a trunk containing several 
perfectly good suits of clothes and various other 
more or less valuable articles which he set great 
store by, besides over a hundred dollars in green- 
backs. We hunted among the ruins, of course, but 
not a vestige of anything savable did we find. 

Three days later, however, Sanford himself ar- 
rived and took one look at the ruins. Then, without 
a word, he started poking about with his stick. 
From underneath where his bed had been he dug up 
a little box containing several hundred dollars in 
greenbacks, and from the earth beneath the charred 
ruins of the chest of drawers he did likewise. Then 
he stood up and laughed at us. I will admit that 
he had a perfect right to laugh. He, the one man 
of the three of us who could best afford to lose any- 
thing, was the only man whose money had been 
saved. Which only goes to prove the proverbial 
luck of the rich man. 

Not long after this experience I moved to Critten- 
den, where I farmed awhile, running buggy trips to 
the mines in the neighborhood as a side line. 

One day a man named Wheeler, of Wheeler & 
Perry, a Tucson merchandise establishment, came to 
Crittenden and I drove him out to Duquesne. On 
the way Wheeler caught sight of a large fir-pine tree 
growing on the slope of a hill. He pointed to it 
and said: 

"Say, John, Fd give something to have that tree 
in my house at Christmas." 



In Age the Cricket Chirps 117 

It was then a week or so to the twenty-fifth of 
December. 

I glanced at the tree and asked him : 

"You would, eh? Now, about how much would 
you give?" 

'Td give five dollars," he said. 

"Done!" I said. "You give me five dollars and 
count that tree yours for Christmas!" And we 
shook hands on it. 

A few days later I rigged up a wagon, took along 
three Mexicans with axes, and cut a load of Christ- 
mas trees — I think there were some three hundred in 
the load. Then I drove the wagon to Tucson and 
after delivering Wheeler his especial tree and receiv- 
ing the stipulated five dollars for it, commenced 
peddling the rest on the streets. 

And, say! Those Christmas trees sold like wild- 
fire. Everybody w^anted one. I sold them for as 
low as six-bits and as high as five dollars, and before 
I left pretty nearly everybody in Tucson owned one 
of my trees. 

When I counted up I found that my trip had 
netted me, over and above expenses, just one thou- 
sand dollars. 

This, you will have to admit, was some profit 
for a load of Christmas trees. Sad to relate, how- 
ever, a year later when I tried to repeat the per- 
formance, I found about forty other fellows ahead 
of me loaded to the guards with Christmas trees of 
all kinds and sizes. For a time Christmas trees were 



118 Arizona's Yesterday 

cheaper than mesquite brush as the overstocked 
crowd endeavored to unload on an oversupphed 
town. I escaped with my outfit and my Hfe but 
no profits — that time. 



On December 15, 1900, I moved to Patagonia, 
which had just been born on the wave of the copper 
boom. I rented a house, which I ran successfully 
for one year, and then started the building of the 
first wing of the Patagonia Hotel, which I still own 
and run, together with a dance-hall, skating rink 
and restaurant. Since that first wing was built the 
hotel has changed considerably in appearance, for 
whenever I got far enough ahead to justify it, I 
built additions. I think I may say that now the 
hotel is one of the best structures of its kind in the 
county. I am considering the advisability of more 
additions, including a large skating rink and dance- 
hall, but the copper situation does not justify me in 
the outlay at present. 

I am entirely satisfied with my location, however. 
Patagonia is not a large place, but it is full of con- 
genial friends and will one day, when the copper 
industry again finds its feet, be a large town. It is 
in the very heart of the richest mining zone in the 
world, if the assayers are to be believed. Some of 
the mining properties, now nearly all temporarily 
closed down, are wforld-famous — I quote for ex- 
ample the Three R., the World's Fair, the Flux, the 



In Age the Cricket Chirps 119 

Santa Cruz, the Hardshell, the Harshaw, the Her- 
mosa, the Montezuma, the Mansfield and the 
Mowry. 

This last, nine miles from Patagonia, was a pro- 
ducer long before the Civil War. Lead and silver 
mined at the Mowry were transported to Galveston 
to be made into bullets for the war — imagine being 
hit with a silver bullet! In 1857 Sylvester Mowry, 
owner of the Mowry mine and one of the earliest 
pioneers of Arizona, was chosen delegate to Con- 
gress by petition of the people, but was not admitted 
to his seat. Mowry was subsequently banished from 
Arizona by Commander Carleton and his mine con- 
fiscated for reasons which were never quite clear. 



My purpose in writing these memoirs is two-fold : 
First, I desired that my children should have a rec- 
ord which could be referred to by them after I am 
gone; and, secondly, that the State of Arizona, my 
adopted home, should be the richer for the posses- 
sion of the facts I have at my disposal. 

I want the reader to understand that even though 
the process of evolution has taken a life-time, I can- 
not cease wondering at the marvelous development 
of the Territory and, later, State of Arizona. When 
I glance back over the vista of years and see the 
old, and then open my eyes to survey the new, it 
is almost as though a Verne or a Haggard sketch 
had come to life. 



120 Arizona^'s Yesterday 

Who, in an uneventful stop-over at Geronimo, 
Graham county, would believe that these same old 
Indians v^ho sit so peacefully mouthing their ci- 
garros at the trading store v^ere the terrible Apaches 
of former days — the same avenging demons who 
murdered emigrants, fought the modernly-equipped 
soldier \vith bow and arrow, robbed and looted right 
and left and finally were forced to give in to their 
greatest enemy, Civilization. And who shall begin 
to conjecture the thoughts that now and again pass 
through the brains of these old Apache relics, living 
now so quietly on the bounty of a none-too-generous 
government ? What dreams of settlement massacres, 
of stage robberies, of desperate fights, they may con- 
jure up until the wheezy arrival of the Arizona 
Eastern locomotive disperses their visions with the 
blast of sordid actuality ! 

For the Arizona that I knew back in the Frontier 
days was the embodiment of the Old West — the 
West of sudden fortune and still more sudden death ; 
the West of romance and of gold; of bad whiskey 
and doubtful women; of the hardy prospector and 
the old cattleman, who must gaze a little sadly back 
along the trail as they near the end of it, at thought 
of the days that may never come again. 

And now I myself am reaching the end of my 
long and eventful journey, and I can say, bringing 
to mind my youth and all that followed it, that I 
have lived, really lived, and I am content. 

THE END. 



